SAP CAI and Alexa - Email and fallback

[former_member632057]

Hello,

I sent the question below for assistance with an issue with Alexa and Email. For background, read below. As you can see below, Alexa restarts the bot when you attempt to collect an email. When you look at the log feed in SAP, the @ symbol has been removed from the email address. Jean-Yves was looking into it but I haven't heard anything in days. I'm certain other people are coming across this issue. If they haven't, they will. Has anyone been able to investigate?

Appreciate any help. Thanks!

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Hi,

I've created a chatbot that collect a user's first name, last name, email, phone, and an entity called practice group. The bot works perfectly. I was able to create an Alexa skill using this bot but I have encountered a problem.

Using "TEST" in the Alexa development console, Alexa works well except when I attempt to capture this information. Alexa will ask me for the first name, last name, and then the email. When I provide the email, it doesn't move forward. Instead, it restarts the bot from the beginning. It doesn't make a difference if I type or say it. It does not move forward to phone number. It does this every time.

It works fine is SAP but doesn't seem to work in Alexa. Why doesn't Alexa capture an email address? Any assistance would be appreciated.

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Hi Fred,

You might have stumbled on a weird behavior (or potentially a bug). When I test myself, it seems like Alexa (or SAP CAI) is removing the @ sign in the email address.

Could you verify your bot's Log Feed and verify if you also see this behavior? You should see the email address entered from Alexa but with the @ sign replaced with a space.

I will check with colleagues on my side to see what could be the root cause.

BR - Jean-Yves

[jyguyomarch]

Hi Fred,

Not yet much progress on our side. One thing I wanted to confirm with you regarding "alexa restarts bot". From my testing, the @ synbol is removed, but the utterance is passed to CAI normally.

So I would expect your bot to react the same way if you simulate the same utterance in the CAI test console (by manually removing the @ sign before submitting). Could you try that?

BR - Jean-Yves

[former_member632057]

Hi Jean-Yves

When I use the bot outside of the Alexa environment, it works perfectly. When I use Alexa, it will ask me for the email address and once I provide the email, it will restart the bot and not continue to the phone number and message.

Hope that helps.

[jyguyomarch]

freelegal1 what I meant is when you test the bot in another environment, and you reach the step where you need to provide your email address, try to enter for example "firstname.lastname domain.com" and see how the bot handles it.

My expectation is that it would be the same behavior as Alexa, as for now I think that the only issue is that the at sign is removed.

[former_member632057]

Jean-Yves,

I tried it in webchat, and SAPCAI. It works fine. Its only in Alexa. As a test, I even tried to place an email in a free text field and it did the same thing.

Also, I noticed that its eliminating the (.) DOT in the email address as well. So to recap, its removing the @ and the .DOT from the email address. For example:

Jim@email.com is converted to Jim email com

Maybe Alexa / SAPCAI has an issue with special characters. Check your LOG FEED to see if its taking out the DOT as well as the @

Thanks,

Fred

[jyguyomarch]

kglegal1 thx for double checking. Yes everything points to something on Alexa side. We'll dig deeper and get back to you.

[former_member632057]

Has anyone been able to take a look at this problem regarding SAP CAI and Alexa Integration? The problem with Alexa not being able to send email information properly to SAPCAI.

This is a pretty important issue