Introduction:
In OBI Bots, there are two bot turns that are very similar: Question and Open Question. In this article, we explain the differences between them.
Question vs Open Question:
| Open Question | Question | |
| Construction | Intents that must be recognized are start points for intent dialogs. From the Open Question you’ll ‘jump’ to either one of the intent dialogs | Intents that must be recognized are specified in the user turns that are connected to the Question turn in the flow |
| When used? | Used to let the chatbot recognize a wide range of intents from just one single Open Question | Used to only make specific intents recognizable from the specific Question |
| Buttons? |
Only text input but it is possible to create ‘suggestion buttons’ to provide a little bit of guidance (only for web!) |
Both text input and buttons use ‘choices’ to create a button construction (only for web!) |
| Maintenance | Easy to add or remove intents by adding or removing intent dialogs | Harder to add or remove intents, because you need to build or remove user turns in the flow |
| What if the user has more than one question? | Easy to create dynamic conversations, because whenever you’ll use an Open Question again somewhere in the conversation, all intent dialogs can be accessed again | Harder to create dynamic conversations, because after the bot reply containing the answer to the question, it is hard to let the chatbot recognize another intent without letting the chatbot start from the beginning or building another question behind it. |