Using slot in Watson Assistant and Node RED

Question

I'm building a chatbot on Telegram with Watson Assistant and Node RED. I need to take a date and time from the user for booking an appointment, so I used a slot that require the insertion of the two information. Using the trial chatbot offered by Watson, I have no problem with slot; but using Node RED, I can't go beyond entering the date. Through the debug, I saw that after entering the date, then after running the first slot, this error is returned "msg.payload.content is empty". Moreover, going to see the body of the output message returned by the assistant, the msg.payload.output.generic field is empty. On the other hand, it should contain the response of the assistant who requests, after having entered the date, also to insert the time. It seems that the bot is stuck on entering the date, but in reality I don't think so, because in the trial chatbot, it works perfectly.

What could be the problem?

Answer 1

Neither the Assistant V1 nor the V2 set or look at msg.payload.content. On input they look at msg.payload and on exit they assign the response from Watson Assistant to msg.payload.

If you are getting a "msg.payload.content" is empty error, then that will be happening somewhere in your flow. Most likely at the end where you are trying to process the response. If msg.payload.content is empty then the assistant dialog is not returning any output. This is strange as it should be returning the prompt for the currently empty slot.

What does msg.payload look like?

Are you using the V1 or the V2 node, and which version of node-red-node-watson nodes are you using? You can tell, by going to the palette.

Both V1 and V2 nodes, however, have been tested with slots, and the response does end up on msg.payload.content. Current released version of node-red-node-watson is 0.9.0.