The essential guide to collecting cities and countries inputted by users in Previews/Tests.
When designing/prototyping a conversational interface, you may come across a few opportunities where you will need to capture different locations such as cities and countries. In Botmock, one option is to create your own custom entity to handle capturing specific places, but we're also happy to be able to offer the Built-in City and Country Entities to use for within Previews and Usability Tests.
The ability to use these specific built-in entities is available to every flow project in every supported conversational channel in Botmock. Also, before reading this tutorial, please review the article on Intents, Variables, and Entities in Botmock.
To get started using these built-in entities, the best thing to do is to create a variable, which in this case, we will call "Location" to be called in Intents and potentially called back during a conversation test. In this variable, we will leave the the Variable Type as "text" and the field for the default value will be blank.
The main option here comes in the form of the entity type, where, rather than creating a custom entity with its own values, you will get access to Botmock's list of top cities and countries around the world. You can select each separately and work through them separately when previewing/testing a conversation flow.
After you select the entity type, you will now have the option to call the variable within an Intent in order to capture data and move a conversation forward in a preview or a test.
For a city, you can input a value such as New York, London, and more, which will get saved as a variable once entered as well. Not all cities around the world are recognized within Botmock at the moment.
For inputting a location with the "Country" entity (such as United States, Canada, France), we do offer support for every country around the world, so any country value that is entered by user/tester will move the conversation forward and save it as a variable to be used around a Preview/Usability Test.
And with that, you get a good example of how Variables and the Built-In City/County Entities can play a role to improve a high-fidelity conversational prototype. A useful reminder to mention is that that these entities can be used not only within internal previews, but can also be inputted and collected within external Usability Tests.
If you have any questions or feedback about our location entities, please feel free to email us at help@botmock.com. Happy Prototyping!