This is a common request that comes up often with the new Watson Assistant.

This is where you offer options at the end of an action which can link off to another action. Using normal options forces the user to respond to the buttons and prevents them leaving that action.

Another use case is asking the user if they were happy with the response. In this example I’m going to show how to do a thumbs up/down as a follow up.

First we need to create a Thumbs up and Thumbs down intent. Both are exactly the same. It is one training example, the emoticon 👍 or 👎. One step that says if they had a positive or negative response.

Next click the options on the action and make sure to switch off “Ask clarifying questions”.

Once you have created those two actions. Next is the survey action. This should contain no training questions and the settings above switched off. This is to prevent it triggering except called from another action.

The step you are going to select the </> button to show the json and replace with the following:

{
  "generic": [
    {
      "title": "How was my response?",
      "options": [
        {
          "label": "👍",
          "value": {
            "input": {
              "text": "👍"
            }
          }
        },
        {
          "label": "👎",
          "value": {
            "input": {
              "text": "👎"
            }
          }
        }
      ],
      "response_type": "option"
    }
  ]
}

This creates custom option buttons which are non-blocking.

Lastly in your action you want the response to trigger the survey. You can do this by calling the action as a sub-action.

Now when you run it, you end up with something like below.

As always, I’ve included the sample skill for you to try.

Important:
In a real world production instance it is not good practise to have a thumbs/up down after every response. As this reduces the users confidence in the system.

Imagine having a customer support person asking for validation after every answer given. You wouldn’t trust their response either.

The other part of it is that often end users will make their thumbs up/down from an emotional response, and not a logical one.

If you really need to do this, then I recommend to put a confidence level into survey. So it doesn’t trigger unless the confidence level is very low. A better option is to use the custom survey demonstrated in the Lendyr demo.