Guide to Flow Studio

Owned by Rajkiran Alla (Deactivated)
Last updated: Jul 05, 2022 by Bharathi Manohar (Deactivated)
7 min read

What is Flow Studio?

Orbita Flow Studio is a "no-code" way to build conversational experiences. It is an intuitive, graphical studio with a flowchart-like interface for creating rich, conversational applications. With Orbita Flow Studio’s low-code environment, anyone can quickly build powerful voice and chatbot applications using ready-made controls and pre-built templates. Orbita Flow adds to Orbita’s already rich set of tools for accelerating the creation of voice and chatbot-powered healthcare applications.

Orbita Flow Studio reduces bottlenecks and lets designers and content authors create and manage conversational applications through its intuitive drag-and-drop visual editor. The Flow Studio visual application builder was created with these intermediate users in mind and requires no development expertise.

 

When should you use Flow Studio?

  • Any time you are building decision tree style conversational dialogs. Situations, where this might be the case, include, defining assessments, modeling care protocols, and in general, needing to define deterministic logic to handle the conversational flow.

  • If you are trying to manage a conversational state, you should use Flow Studio

In contrast, Experience Designer should be used when needing to integrate with third-party systems, write functions, or extend the base capabilities of Flow Studio.

Both systems, Flow Studio, and Experience Designer work together. Flow Studio is used to define the conversational decision trees. Experience Designer hosts the execution. From a programming standpoint, this is similar to the separation of data and code. Flow Studio allows you to define the business logic as data, while Experience Designer hosts the execution of the logic. The Experience Designer can intercept a user intent and switch flows that are being executed.

Getting started

  1. Login to Experience Manager

  2. Select a project.

  3. From the project side navigation menu, select Create > Agents > Flow Studio.

Creating a new flow

  1. Select a flow from the Flow Studio listing page or click Create a Flow button to add a new flow.

     

  2. Enter a Title and Description in the Add a New Flow dialog box and click ADD to open the flow studio. Auto Generate Slots is enabled by default.
    While creating/editing a Flow studio flow, you can add utterances using the Add Utterances button.
    These utterances are grouped in an autogenerated intent. The intent can be accessed using the Flow Group Intent.
    You should add the Flow Group Intent node to the Flow Manager node in the Experience designer to use these utterances to invoke the corresponding flow.

     

    Auto Generate slots will store the 'Choice Values' and 'Choice Texts' of "Choose many" and "Choose one" nodes of flow studio.
    Note: Google Dialog flow limits the number of slots an intent can contain. Therefore, if you use Google Dialog flow for publishing your interaction model, you should restrict yourself to creating only 20 Flow Studio flows with Auto Generate Slots enabled, because each flow will have a dynamically created unique slot name that will be used in the OrbitaFlowStudio intent. If you intend to create and use more than 20 flows, you should disable the Auto Generate Slots and create custom slots for the Choices used in the flow.

  3. Every flow has an ID on the top of the screen and the control pane to the right side of the page.
    Note: Zoom options are placed in the bottom right corner.

  4. Drag and drop the controls from the control panel to the canvas to start creating a flow.

  5. To save the flow, click Save.

Editing an existing flow

If a flow already exists, click the vertical ellipses menu corresponding to the flow name.

The vertical ellipsis menu has the following options:

  1. Flow Details

  2. Delete

  3. Flow Data

  4. Import/export

  5. Flow History

  6. Copy Flow Studio ID

Flow Details

You can edit the Title, Description, Enable/disable Auto Generate Slots, Add/remove Utterances, view the Flow creator, Created Date, Last Updated, the last user that modified the flow.

You can edit the Title, Description, Enable/disable Auto Generate Slots, Add/remove Utterances, view the Flow creator, Created Date, Last Updated, the last user that modified the flow.

Delete

Delete the flow. This requires confirmation.

Flow Data

The flow data capture the answers given by the chatbot user to the flow studio questions.
If the chatbot user is logged in, the Flow Data is populated with the first name of the user.
If the chatbot user is not logged in, the Flow Data is populated with “Anonymous“.
You can choose to delete an entry by clicking on the Delete option from the verticle ellipses button.

You can export the entire data using the Export option from the hamburger button.

Flow Data

You can export the entire data using the Export option from the hamburger button.

Import / Export

The import/export dialog box has 2 tabs

Export

Select the Export tab and click the copy to clipboard button to copy the JSON code.

Import

To import a flow studio flow, you should have a flow studio flow already created.

Go to the destination flow studio flow and click on the vertical ellipses button > Import/export.

Select the Import tab and paste a JSON code in the space provided to import the flow and click Import.

Flow History

Changes done to the flow studio by a user will be saved in the Flow History option.

The Flow History window contains the below details on every action done on the Flow studio.

  1. Avatar/ Initials.

  2. Action - Update, Delete, or Restored.

  3. Username - of the user that did the action.

  4. Date - Created/Modified

  5. Menu icon

    1. View - To view changes

    2. Restore - To restore changes to an earlier point.

Copy Flow Studio ID

Click this option to copy the Flow Studio ID to the clipboard.

Flow Studio Controls

The Flow Studio controls are logical blocks that you can use to create a meaningful conversation.
Refer 3.3.9 Flow Studio Controls

Flow Manager Node

The Flow studio interacts with the Experience Designer using the Flow Manager Node.
Refer 3.3.5 Flow Manager Node

Flow Preview

During the flow development process, the end-conversational user's experience can be observed firsthand using Flow Preview. The Preview in Chat-Bot option on the Flow Studio canvas can be used to preview a chatbot flow that is currently being developed.

Click on the Preview in Chat-Bot option on the canvas, as shown in the image below. The Bot preview page will open in a new tab using the Default Bot Settings in the project.

Setup process:

  • In order for this functionality to perform properly, the Google Agent must be deployed. For steps to deploy your Google Agent please refer How to Publish the interaction model to Dialogflow?

  • In the Experience Designer, the user must have the Flow Manager flow with Flow Group intent set for their existing projects. More info on Flow Manager setup is here 3.3.5 Flow Manager Node

    You can import a sample Flow Manager flow by accessing Experience Designer> Hamburger Menu> Import> Built-in> OrbitaFlows> Flow Manager

  • The Experience Designer flows will be configured automatically for new projects.

To support this functionality, a new Flow preview intent will be generated.

Auto Save Flow

The checkbox on the bottom left of the Flow Studio Canvas page, Auto Save will help users auto save the change they make on the Flow Studio canvas. By default this is unchecked. The user has to opt in.

When enabled, actions like the below will Auto save the flow changes,

  • Editing and saving any Flow Studio control.

  • When we click the Back To Flow Studio button.

  • If we navigate to any other module from the left navigation menu, the flow changes get saved.

Sample Flow

The following image shows a sample Flow studio flow.

  File Modified

File flow_manager_setup.json

Nov 11, 2019 by Rajkiran Alla

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