How do I connect my database to API.AI?

Question

How do I connect my database to API.AI

Making every sentence into INTENT and creating entities for each doesn't seem to be a good idea? So what is the best possible way to go about?

Answer 1

As far as I know it is not possible yet, but you can switch to row mode and past your entities inCVS or JSON format OR import a JSON/CSV file containing all your entities.

The file should look like below (JSON format):

[
    {
        "value": "val1",
        "synonyms": [
            "syn1",
            "syn2"
        ]
    },
   {
        "value": "val2",
        "synonyms": [
            "syn21",
            "syn22"
        ]
    },
]

So you can image of writing a small job that reads entities from you DB and make a JSON/CSV file according the wanted format.

Once the job done, this process may dramatically facilitate the creation of your entities on api.ai.

Answer 2

If you use a webhook for an intent, you can pass params to your endpoint where you can do all the queries to your db

I did a demo where I was querying news (cheating as I was getting it from the web, but I could plug a DB).

The was getting requests such as:

"What are the latest news about France"

latest and France would be params that I send through to the webhook endpoint.

You would get the following JSON sent your endpoint by API.AI

  "result": {
    "source": "agent",
    "resolvedQuery": "latest news about France",
    "action": "show.news",
    "actionIncomplete": false,
    "parameters": {
      "adjective": "latest",
      "subject": "France"
    }

Then you can query all the news for France and order them by latest

In my understanding the idea is to create entities that are "placeholders" for the values you need to query. Then you teach the AI with few examples by tagging in the request what did the person ask. Let say someone asks:

"what is the  oldest news about France?"

The AI may not know what is oldest thus you tell it is is an adjective and from now on you can get oldest as a param