Your best bet for "if assistant recognizes" is to use entities. In your example above, where you might want to customize a response based on a specific location, you could define a @location entity and add target values like @location:germany and @location:france. One benefit to this approach is that you can use entity value synonyms to easily expand recognition of common alternate names (e.g. for @location:germany you could have synonyms like deutschland, berlin, bavaria, etc.) so your bot can handle those without you needing to build all of that out in the dialog logic.
$where:bostonor@sys-location:bostondon't work if "Boston" is recognized. How do I enforce case-insensitive comparisons? – orome@sys-time.after('21:00:00')don't seem to be recognized, even if they are mentioned in the docs. – orome