Intelligent Assistant

About the Assistant

The Assistant creates a slot in the task frame only when a template is matched. For
example, if the

when_obj

template is not matched, the

when

slot is not created.

If any frame represented in the

signature

array is not present (that is, if its

lexicon was not matched) the Assistant may still call your

PostParse

method

if it can match an action frame with your task template's primary action. Your

PostParse

method must validate all input and deal with missing objects

appropriately. For example, if your

PostParse

method cannot obtain the missing

information by parsing the task frame or looking elsewhere for it (such as in the
appropriate soup), it can display a task slip to solicit further input from the user.

The Task Frame

18

When your

PostParse

method is called, the

ParseUtter

function will have

added slots to the task frame. You can use the information in these slots for your
own purposes. For example, your

PostParse

method can extract additional

information for use in displaying a task slip.

This section describes the

entries

,

phrases

,

noiseWords

,

value

and

origPhrase

slots that the

ParseUtter

function adds to the task frame. These

slots are added only when they are needed to hold information. For example, if no
soup entries are matched in the parsing process, the

entries

slot is not added to

the task frame.

The Entries Slot

18

If a template matches a soup entry, an alias to that entry is returned as an element
of the array residing in the

entries

slot of the task frame. To retrieve an entry

from this array, use the

GetMatchedEntries

global function.

The Phrases Slot

18

The result frame returned by the

ParseUtter

function contains a

phrases

slot

that holds an array of strings. Each word in the input phrase that matches a template
is returned as an element of the

phrases

array.

For example the following code fragment depicts the

phrases

array that might be

returned after parsing the input string

"call Bob".

// input string is "call Bob"
{...
phrases: ["call", "Bob"],
...}

Elements of the

phrases

array can store more than a single word. For example, if

the parser searches the Names soup for an object of the type

who_obj

having the