Ask: custom entity

To ask for a specific piece of information

When you need to extract a piece of information from a user (an Entity) that is not covered in one of the other Ask variants, like Ask phone, Ask email, Ask Number, etc, but you don't know upfront the exact list of options you can use the Ask custom entity.

When asking for instance for a City in the Netherlands, it is not doable to use Ask choice or Ask selection because it would simply require too much options to be configured in the flow. The Ask custom entity will try to capture the answer to a question as good as possible. It uses chat GPT in the background to complete the task. Since chat GPT knows how city names are used in a sentence (like "I live in Amsterdam") and because chat GPT knows quite a number of cities due to its training, it would be able to extract a city name from a sentence quite well.

Here are two examples of where this node is used. One to extract cities and the other to extract car brands.

Example of how to extract the name of a city using Ask custom entity

For this to work the only thing that needs to be configured in the Ask custom entity node is the following:

Ask custom entity for asking cities

The next example shows the same kind of excercise, but this time asking car brands to the user.

Example of how to extract the name of a car brand using Ask custom entity

For this example the ask custom entity node is configured as follows:

Ask custom entity for asking car brands

Since chat GPT is used under the hood, the extraction works best for commonly used entities that rely on data that is commonly available in the dataset chat GPT was trained on. For example, asking for an internal company specific entity like part names and numbers of products that are not publicly available to the outside world will be less likely to be extracted in a good way.

Node properties

Property	Description	Explanation
Question	The original question
Try again (1)	To assign the result to a variable in the conversation	optional
Try again (2)	The repeat question when wrong input is provided	optional
Assign to	To assign the result to a variable in the conversation
Remember	To store the variable in the user object too
Record audio ☎	On phone channels there is an option to record the audio of the answer
Assign audio URL to	When record audio is toggled the URL to the audio file will be stored in this variable	Only displayed and mandatory when Record audio is toggled.
Expecting	Describe what entity to are expecting	Like: Cities in the Netherlands, Car brands or Prices.
Examples	Give some of examples of the entities you would like to get captured.	In the case of cities: "Amsterdam", "Rotterdam", etc.