What is the Recommendations API?
The Recommendation API is a REST API that allows you to ask Conversation Orchestrator for the next best actions (route to skill, send a response, etc.) for your bot/app. Accessing the API can be done via a JavaScript method from within a Conversation Builder bot or via the REST API for external automations and apps.
When to use the Recommendations API
A typical use case for using the Recommendation API is to get a routing decision to transfer to a skill from a bot or LOB app:
- A brand’s concierge bot (for example, a bot built in Conversation Builder) handles branded greetings, dialogs, and intents.
-
It then calls the Recommendation API, which evaluates all the policies set up in Dynamic Routing and returns the next best action.
- If you're using the Conversation Orchestrator bot template, the ask maven call is already pre-configured for you, and you don’t have to do this.
- If you're using a different Conversation Builder bot, you can use the askMaven JavaScript method.
- If you're using a third-party bot on any external platform (for example, Google Dialogflow), use the REST API.
Please see Dynamic Routing's Getting Started topic for more information.
-
The concierge bot then uses the action (for example, route to a skill) to transfer the conversation to that skill in Conversational Cloud.
This is often used in conjunction with the Conversation Context Service to pass custom attributes to use in a policy (for example, intents).
Getting started
- Log in to Conversation Orchestrator with your Conversational Cloud credentials, and navigate to Developer Key.
-
Copy and paste the key provided, and use it in your API headers.
To generate a new key, click the Regenerate Key button. This will invalidate the previous key. The key is shared for all Conversation Orchestrator APIs; therefore, you must use the new key wherever the APIs are being called.