Personal Assistant

SUSI is an intelligent  personal assistant. SUSI can learn skills to understand and respond to user queries better. A skill is taught using rules. Writing rules is an easy task and one doesn’t need any programming background too. Anyone can start contributing. Check out these tutorials and do watch this video to get started and start teaching susi. SUSI can be taught to call external API’s to answer user queries. While writing skills we first mention string patterns to match the user's query and then tell SUSI what to do with the matched pattern. The pattern matching is similar to regular expressions and we can also retrieve the matched parameters using $<parameter number>$ notation. Example : My name is * Hi $1$! When the user inputs “My name is Uday” , it is matched with “My name is *” and “Uday” is stored in $1$. So the output given is “Hi Uday!”. SUSI can call an external API to reply to user query. An API endpoint or url when called must return a JSON or JSONP response for SUSI to be able to parse the response and retrieve the answer. Rule Format for a skill calling an external API The rule format for calling an external API is : <regular expression for pattern matching> !console: <return answer using $object$ or $required_key$> { “url”: “<API endpoint or url>”, “path”: “$.<key in the API response to find the answer>”, } eol Url is the API endpoint to be called which returns a JSON or JSONP response. The parameters to the url if any can be added using $$ notation. Path is used to help susi know where to look for the answer in the returned response. If the path points to a root element, then the answer is stored in $object$, otherwise we can query $key$ to get the answer which is a value to the key under the path. eol or end of line indicates the end of the rule. Understanding the Path Attribute Let us understand the Path attribute better through some test cases. In each of the test cases we discuss what the path should be and how to retrieve the answer for a given required answer from the json response of an API. API response in json : { “Key1” : “Value1” } Required answer : Value1 Path : “$.Key1    =>   Retrieve Answer:  $object$   API response in json : { “Key1” : [{“Key11” : “Value11”}] } Required answer : Value11 Path : $.Key1[0]   =>  Retrieve Answer: $Key11$ Path : $.Key1[0].Key11   => Retrieve Answer: $object$   API response in json : { “Key1” : {“Key11” : “Value11”} } Required answer : Value11 Path : $.Key1  => Retrieve Answer:  $Key11$ Path : $.Key1.Key11  => Retrieve Answer: $object$   API response in json : { “Key1” : { “Key11” : “Value11”, “Key12” : “Value12” } } Required answer : Value11 , Value12 Path : $.Key1  => Retrieve Answer:  $Key11$ , $Key12$ Where to write these rules? Now, since we know…