Anatomy of a message

A single /message API call is equivalent to a single turn in a conversation, which consists of a message that is submitted by a customer and a corresponding response from your assistant.

Each reply that a customer makes in response to a prompt from the assistant is passed as an independent /message API call.

The body of the /message API call request and response includes the following objects:

• context: Contains variables that are meant to be persisted. For the dialog to subsequently reference information that is submitted by the user, you must store the information in the context object. For example, the dialog can collect the user's name and then refer to the user by name in subsequent nodes. The following example shows how the context object is represented in the dialog JSON editor:

  {
  "context" : {
    "user_name" : "<? @name.literal ?>"
  }
  

  See Retaining information across dialog turns for more information.

• input: The string of text that was submitted by the user. The text string can contain up to 2,048 characters. The following example shows how the input object is represented in the dialog JSON editor:

  {
  "input" : {
    "text" : "Where's your nearest store?"
  }
  

• output: The dialog response to return to the user. The following example shows how the output object is represented in the dialog JSON editor:

  {
  "output": {
  "generic": [
    {
      "values": [
        {
          "text": "This is my response text."
        }
      ],
      "response_type": "text",
      "selection_policy": "sequential"
    }
  ]
  }
  }
  

In the resulting API /message response, the text response is formatted as follows:

{
   "text": "This is my response text.",
   "response_type": "text"
}

There are response types other than a text response that you can define. See Responses for more details.

For more information about the /message API call, see the API reference.

For information about how to refer to these message objects within a conversation, see Expressions for accessing objects.