User Attention Flows (attention.co)

Flows to handle user attention.

tracking user attention

For the automatic handling of user attention events, you need to activate this flow to track user attention levels during the last user utterance. This information will be used to change the functionality of all user said flows such that they will no longer finish when the user says something while being inattentive.

Example:

import core
import attention

flow main
     # Activate the flow at the beginning to make sure user attention events are tracked properly
     activate tracking user attention

     ...

user said (overwritten)

When you include attention.co in your bot folder, it overrides all user said related flows so that these flows only consider user utterances when the user is attentive. You can overwrite the default attention check by overwriting the flow attention checks explained below. For your first test, the default implementation should work well with the Tokkio setup.

Example:

import core
import attention

flow main
     activate tracking user attention

     # Since the attention module overwrites all user said related flows, this line will wait until the user says
     # something while being attentive.
     user said something
     bot say "I heard you and you are attentive"

attention checks $event -> $is_attentive

The attention checks flow is called whenever the system needs to decide if a user utterance was completed while the user was attentive. You can overwrite the default behavior by overwriting this flow in your bot script.

Example:

import core
import attention

@override
flow attention checks $event -> $is_attentive
     # Implement your custom attention logic here
     $is_attentive = True
     return $is_attentive

user said something inattentively

The user said something while being inattentive. Use this flow to let the user know that the bot assumes that the user is not attentive and the utterance will be ignored.

Example:

import core
import attention
import avatar # Only needed for the optional bot gesture we use below

flow main
     activate tracking user attention
     when user said something
          bot say "I hear you"
     or when user said something inattentively
          bot say "You seem distracted. Can you repeat?" and bot gesture "asking if something refers to them, being unsure if they're being addressed"