Actions

Overview

Actions enable the assistant to not only answer questions, but also act on behalf of the user. They do this by making an API call when it detects the user's intention to trigger the action, asking for and filling in the necessary parameters to do so. Actions can be managed using the API, or using the Seirime dashboard:

For advanced use cases, such as chaining actions or using storage to persist action results for use in follow-up actions, it is advised to use the Action API.

Confirmation

Actions can be configured to require user confirmation before being executed, giving the user a breakdown of the things that are about to happen and asking if they are ok with this. This provides an extra failsafe, that is especially handy for actions that have consequences (POST PUT PATCH API calls).

Authorization

Actions that make changes to a user's account will often need to be authorized, so that users can only edit their own details. This is supported through storage cookies. Actions and their clients can be set up to use attributes in keys sent to the Seirime API. In the headers field of the action client, the Authorization key can be set to for example Bearer {{ $storage.token }}. Each action API call will made using the value set in the cookie.

Action chaining

Certain actions will always need to be done in a certain order, a good example of this would be a product ordering flow:

product selection → filling in delivery address → payment

This is where chains are useful. Attaching an action to a chain ensures it is only considered by the assistant if the preceding action was already executed.

Storage

When chaining actions, the output of one action is often the input of the next one in the chain. Storage can be used to capture these output values for later use, such as in a subsequent action.