Dialogflow intent lifespan best practice and performance

Question

I am developping a vocal assistant with dialogflow and I have a question about the lifespan of an intent. As far as I understand, the lifespan value gives me the number of possible interactions inside this intent. It is decremented at each interaction and when is equal to 0 the value cannot be recognized as a possible value of the intent.

The default value of a lifespan is 5 but I can set it to any value like 99.

In my agent I try to always set the lifespan of my context to 0 when I want to quit it. Is it the best practise for quitting a context?

Also, in some contexts where there are often more than 5 interactions, I am tempted to initialize lifespan to 99. But, can it deteriorate the performance if we put large values for lifespan? Once again, what is the best practice for lifspan and context management?

Many many thanks

Answer 1

Changing the lifespan of context is the good practise to control the flow of the conversation. But in my opinion, to make conversation in a good pace, make the lifespan of context to the lesser value, because it will appears to be lengthy conversation with user till the expected answer.

A good source of the explanation of lifespan is :-- https://miningbusinessdata.com/optimal-context-lifespan-in-api-ai/

Answer 2

Yes, explicitly setting the context lifespan to 0 to indicate the context is no longer valid is a reasonable practice. I tend to do the opposite - every time I'm in the fulfillment that is still in the context, I'll reset the lifespan to the full value.

As for choosing a full value, I think it depends on how the context itself works. Setting it to "99" while active and "0" when you know it is invalid makes sense for a lot of things, but ignores some of the power of the lifespan countdown. In some cases, it might make sense to let it count down to help keep track of how many times the user has tried to do something inside (or outside) that particular context.

For example, if a user asks for "help", you might set a "help" context with a lifespan of 3. If they don't ask for more help within 3 tries, this context will timeout. If the user asks for help again while the context is active, you can handle it one way. If not, you handle it differently.

Remember that you can set more than one context, and the context check is for all the ones specified being active. You can use this, combined with the automatic countdown, to your advantage in some cases.

Bottom line, however:

• Contexts are incredibly powerful.
• How you use them depends on your needs.