Can we turn off or disable the standard responses?

We are getting a question frequently - “Can we turn off standard responses?”

Please note that “Standard Response” is a part of the default conversation of a bot. A user can potentially sk anything under the universe to the bot. If the bot is not trained adequately to understand the intent, bot still has to respond back in some way. Hence any bot on Kore.ai platform comes with some “Standard Responses”

Here are a few things to be noted regarding standard responses -

  1. If Kore.ai provides a way to turn-off standard responses of a bot, the bot may not respond in certain situations.
  2. Every standard response has a pretext/condition on which it is triggered. There are no keyword mapping to invoke a standard response at will. It is response to a situation/condition - not a bot response to a trained keyword or phrase. So, it is not possible to list out the keywords which may trigger a particular standard response. The situations under which the standard responses are triggered are listed here.
  3. One can edit standard responses to suite their needs. As of now there is no way to factory reset a standard response once edited and saved. So editing some tags like < list-of-tasks> may stop working like before. Hence certain standard reponses - like when the bot deals with possible ambiguous intents or ambiguous entity values, may need a usage of the getchoices() function. For a multilingual bot you may need an additional usage of koreUtil.autoTranslate() (Refer to Tips for working with multi-lingual virtual assistants and The documentation on the auto translate function.
  4. Editing some authorization related standard responses may need usage of koreUtil.getCurrentOptions. Again for a multi-lingual bot usage of koreUtil.autoTranslate() may be required.
  5. Instead of editing the ‘all channel’ instance of a standard response we recommend to add a channel response.
  6. Please note - The standard responses are not a part of bot-definition. ONLY the edited ones and newly added responses are stored as a part of the bot-definition because they are specific to the bot. Rest of the default standard responses are system responses for certain conditions (as explained earlier) and are maintained centrally in the database.
  7. The platform team is trying to see if a reset functionality can be provided for the standard responses to negate any unintentional changes.