For the google actions that i am developing some responses are complex and take more than 5 seconds to process.
Could someone please suggest how can this be handled.
Generally i would consider using loading dots and then replacing that message with the result but i don't see any Google Action API for it. Also is there any endpoint to which we could async send back the result later ?
Thanks
PS: I am using Conversation API.
We don't really have a good way to handle this right now, but we have a couple of approaches that sorta work based on your needs.
Notifications are currently available for the Assistant on smartphones, and they're coming for speakers. In some cases, it might make sense to say that you're working on the problem and you'll send a notification when you have it, and then resume the conversation from the notification.
Another approach is to use the Media Response to play a bit of "hold music". At the end of the segment of music, your webhook will get a notice that the music has completed. If you have the result available, you can report it at that time.
Related
In my conversation dialogflow, I would like to add some progress messages like hang in with me, I'm looking up for that data or similar in the conversation. Is there any guidance or best practice to do this?
Unfortunately, there is no good way to do this at this time. If your webhook takes longer than about 5 seconds, Dialogflow will return one of the default responses it is set with. If you're not using Dialogflow, the Action SDK will say your webhook isn't responding and will close the conversation.
There is currently no way to send a reply, and then send another reply without the user saying something first.
One workaround might be to have the default response be something like "I'm looking that information up. Ask me again in a few seconds." When your lookup finally completes, cache the information so when/if the user asks the question again, you can return it more quickly.
Depending how long it takes, you may also wish to register a dynamic reprompt. This will send an event to your webhook if the user doesn't say anything. In a situation like this, they may say nothing for a few seconds, but that may be long enough for you to have computed the reply. So after a few seconds of silence you can suddenly announce "I've figured it out, the answer you were looking for is..." or something similar. This has some limitations - you can only reprompt twice like this before Google sends you a final reprompt and closes the conversation.
Although the platform does support notifications, these are still in developer preview and don't work with all devices. They also don't quite continue the conversation (it doesn't just start talking) - they just send a notification to a phone that there is a message and that they can restart the conversation. Depending on your use case, this may be useful combined with the above.
Update
The Media Response includes a feature that we can take advantage of to handle this. Similar to the dynamic reprompt method above, you'll get a call automatically when the media you're playing ends. So you can play a short "hold music" and your webhook will be called when it is finished. You can then either give the result or say you're still working on it and play more hold music.
I am going to use Laravel 4 queues and integrate them with Iron.io
All of that is pretty straight forward, and I dont think I am going to have problems with that.
Thing that interests me is what is the best way to get status once task is completed?
Iron.io is going to do return call to my server to trigger job, and once that job completes I need to notify user about that...
How could I store this responses, and still be aware of job its related to, because there will be number of different job types?
I would like to hear how did you implement this.
Thanks
As Joseph pointed out in the comments, you'll need to:
Hopefully have a job quick enough for it to be finished when a user is still in browser
Use some sort of way to PUSH data back to your web browser.
The popular methods are:
Websockets
Server-sent events
Long polling - with ajax
I am working on radio application where i need to convert speech to text. For that i am using third party api's. For geting better results i want to run two api's at the same time and compare the output. this should happen when user clicks on record button.
I know we can do this using GCD but not getting exact idea of how we can achieve this.
Need suggestion.
Thank you.
Th short answer is that you create two GCD queues, one for each Speech-to-Text task. Within each block, you call the two different APIs with the same input data. Then you either wait for the result, or get the block to invoke a callback status method when completed.
Note that you will need to ensure that the speech engines can safely run on background threads.
This is fairly straightforward if you want to record the audio first, then submit the data to two different engines for processing. But it sounds like you might want to start processing the audio as soon as the user clicks Record? In that case, it very much depends on the APIs as to how you feed them data in real time. You might want to just run them on separate threads explicitly and feed them data as it comes in.
How does the notification area on Facebook works?
I'm taking about the automatically red box that appears.
If I have a message/something new on my wall.
I believe it is also in Stack Exchange, is that a Javascript interval?
Please see this thread
How does one do realtime updates of a web page?
Not sure about this, but I'd wager that both Facebook and SO use an implementation of Comet. Basically, you make a request to the server which is designed to be kept open a really long time, and the server only responds when it has something to say. When the request times out (or receives data back) you simply start up another one. This way you get as close to real-time data as you can without wasting a ton of bandwidth on empty requests.
I've decided to integrate OpenFeint into my new game to have achievements and leaderboards.
The game is dynamic and I would like user to be rewarded immediately for some successful results, but as it seems for me, OpenFeint's achievements are a bit sluggish and it shows visual notification only when it receives confirmation from the server.
Is it possible to change something in settings or hack it a little bit to show notification immediately as soon as it checks only local database if the achievement has not been unlocked it?
Not sure if this relates to the Android version of the SDK (which seems even slower), but we couldn't figure out how to make it faster. It was so unacceptably slow that we started developing our own framework that fixes most of open feint's shortcomings and then some. Check out Swarm, it might fit your needs better.
There are several things you can do to more tightly control the timing of these notifications. I'll explain one approach and you can use this as a starting point to explore further on your own. These suggestions apply specifically to iOS apps. One caveat is that these suggestions refer to internal APIs in OFSDK 2.8 for iOS and not ordinarily recommended for high level use and subject to change in future versions.
The first thing I recommend is that you build the sample app with your own product key. Use the standard sample app to experiment before applying the result to your own code.
You are going to get the snappiest response by separating the notification pop-up UI from the process of submitting the achievement. This way you don't have to worry about getting wrapped up in the logic for deciding whether the submission is going just to the local db or is doing the full confirmation on an async network transaction.
See the declaration of "showAchievementNotice" in "OFNotification.h". Performing a search in the sample app, you will see that this is the internal API used for displaying the achievement pop-up when an achievement is earned. It does not actually submit the achievement. You can call this method directly as it is called from "OFAchievementService.mm" to directly control when the message appears. You can then use the following article to disable the pop-up from being called when the actual submission occurs:
http://support.openfeint.com/dev/notification-pop-ups-in-ios/
This gives you complete freedom to call the submission at a later time provided you keep track of the need to do so. For example, you could locally serialize a flag to take care of the actual submission either after the level is done or the next time the app starts up. Don't forget that the user could quit out of a game without cleanly finishing a level.