Visualizing how end-users are expected to interact with the bots is an essential exercise in building successful Virtual Assistants. This helps you design engaging conversations and simplifies the communication between business users, conversation designers, language experts, and bot developers.

The Storyboard is a primary functionality that allows you to visualize and manage your VA design process through FAQs, Dialog Tasks, and mock conversation scenes. These features allow you to simplify and streamline prototyping and facilitates the overall development process.

The Storyboard is therefore the place to start when you want to manage the intents of your Virtual Assistant (with Dialog Tasks and FAQs) and to prototype conversations (with Mock Scenes).

The Storyboard is available within the Kore.ai XO Platform by selecting the VA you are working on, then navigating to: Build > Conversation Skills > Storyboard.

Note: “Virtual Assistant”, “VA” and “Bot” refer to the same concept and are used interchangeably.

Architecture

The Storyboard page includes three sections: FAQs, Dialog Tasks, and Mock Scenes. It acts as a landing page that takes you to key features of the XO Platform, where you can prototype conversations, then develop the Virtual Assistant.

The FAQs and Dialog Tasks sections provide the same features and are in sync with their corresponding modules:

1. Storyboard > FAQs syncs with Conversation Skills > Knowledge Graph.
2. Storyboard > Dialog Tasks sync with Conversation Skills > Dialog Tasks.

The section that is only available within the Storyboard is dedicated to Mock Scenes, hosts your conversation prototypes and is not synced to any other section of the Platform.

FAQs

FAQs allow you to create a Question and Answer type of knowledge graph that trains your bot on answering specific questions. FAQs are one of the primary data sources VAs use to pull information to complete knowledge tasks. Any FAQs you create within the Storyboard will be synced with the Knowledge Graph and vice versa.

Read more about working with FAQs.

Dialog Tasks

Dialog Tasks are the multi-turn conversations that your users can have with the assistant. In the Kore.ai XO Platform, they allow you to configure bot-user interactions, with the purpose of collecting all the information you need in order to reach the user’s goal.

The Storyboard allows you to create Dialog Tasks using the Conversation Designer, which syncs with the Dialog Builder, and vice versa. When creating Dialog Tasks, the Conversation Designer provides a complete set of features that let you go through the entire design process. You can work with the fully-featured Conversation Designer both from Dialog Tasks in the Storyboard and from the main Dialog Tasks module under Build > Conversation Skills > Dialog Tasks.

Read more about working with the Conversation Designer and the Dialog Builder.

Mock Scenes

Mock Scenes are blueprints that you can use to prototype conversations. A scene depicts the conversation as a series of message exchanges between the assistant and the user, which can be assigned to a timeline that maps key points in the conversation. 

To create mock scenes, the Storyboard uses an adapted version of the Conversation Designer, which allows you to type in the bot-user exchange, create a conversation map, link scenes together and collaborate with colleagues during the design process.

The conversations designed within the Mock Scenes section can then be used by bot developers during the bot building process. They can use the fully-featured Conversation Designer along with the Dialog Builder to implement the user-bot exchange and build business logic into the conversation.

Read more about working with Mock Scenes.