Bringing Amazon Lex into your Amazon Connect flows

In this blog we’ll continue our discussion around Amazon Lex. Talk about a few things to keep in mind when integrating your Amazon Lex bot with your Amazon Connect flow. In my particular use case I wanted to use Amazon Lex to look at my Gmail calendar and book a meeting if I’m available. If you want to skip to the very end you can see the end result via video. You’ll see one video of the voice interaction and one of the Facebook Messenger interaction.

First, you might want to reference my previous post around Lex validation. Now let’s talk about our use case:

  • Lex easily allows you to build a bot which understand both voice and text, so our bot needs to handle calls into our call center as well as Facebook Messenger interactions.
  • Bot needs to to ask a few question in order to find out what time the user would like to meet.
  • Bot should only schedule calls between Monday-Friday and 10 AM – 4 PM Easter Time
  • Bot (using Lambda) should schedule a meeting and if slot already taken then suggest an alternate time to meet.

Second, let’s take a quick look at the Lex screen. The bot I created is very simple and it follows closely the Flowers example provided by Amazon. These are the slots I’m requiring my bot to confirm.

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I used two different Lambda functions. One for validation and one for fulfillment. While most examples seem to focus on using the same function for both, for me it was easier to have different code bases for each with the added benefit of keeping the code manageable. As it is both validation and fulfillment both came in at around 250 lines of code, but fulfillment had around 9 megabytes of dependencies.

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Finally, here are sample utterances I used for the main intent.

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What this gets us is the following. The first video is the voice interaction. I went about it the long way to show some of the validation rules being set by the bot, such as no weekend meetings and no meetings too early in the day. At the end of the video you see I refresh the Gmail calendar to show the new appointment has been saved.

In the second video I go through the same Lex bot using Facebook Messenger and then show the calendar to prove that the appointment was saved.

Ultimately, Amazon makes it extremely easy to create a mutli channel bot, however the integration to back end systems is the tricky part. This bot needs a lot of tuning to make it more natural, but for just a few hours of work there’s very little out there that can get your call center to have some bot integration for self service.

~david