Twilio Autopilot - Alphanumeric Field Type Question

0
votes

I created a simple example to collect information when someone types in something like: GIVE missions where GIVE is the task and missions is an example alphanumeric field value. When I test this, the value of the alphanumeric field gets truncated to the first letter and capitalized.

Simulator example

In the Train area I have this: Give {test_var} where test_var is type Twilio.ALPHANUMERIC

I would expect to get the whole value back and not just the first letter.

1
twilio
hi there! What's your account SID? – lizziepika
According to a senior data scientist on the Autopilot team, "this is by design. It extracts the capital letter of non-uppercased words. If it’s MISSION, it would get all letters" – lizziepika
Thanks Lizzie. So is there any way to get the whole string if they weren't caps? Seems like a strange limitation unless there is another field type on the way that can handle lowercase too. – Scott Smith

1 Answers

3
votes

Twilio.ALPHANUMERIC follows the logic below:

  1. It skips normalization if the value is in uppercase and contains alphanumeric characters and no spaces. E.g. 123DJENJ
  2. It normalizes number utterances to digits. E.g. one two three -> 123
  3. It takes the initials of word segments that do not satisfy the first criteria. E.g. alpha beta charlie 12 -> ABC12
  4. It handles cases like yee as in echo -> E to boost the performance in voice channels.

We will improve our documentation on this. Thanks for bringing this up.

In your case, you might just need to define a custom field type for test_var to collect what you want. For custom field types, Autopilot won't do any extra post-processing.