Conversation Flow

A conversation in HALO consists of structured interactions between your end-users (customers or agents) and HALO's AI capabilities. HALO Studio, the content management environment behind HALO, allows you to manage and configure how HALO interacts, providing control over welcome interactions, AI agent behavior, fallback scenarios, and answer validation processes.

This document details the building blocks of HALO's conversational flow, showing how interactions are initiated, escalated, resolved, or gracefully handled, along with detailing the advanced pipeline each interaction passes through before delivery.

Welcome Interactions

Each interaction begins with a welcome step, defined using HALO Studio. This step can be configured as either:

• Static Welcome Message

  • A straightforward, predefined greeting message shown to users initiating a conversation.

  • Example: "Hi there! How can I help you today?"

• Dynamic Welcome Flow

  • Uses a dynamically triggered tool to show interactive or personalized welcome flows.

  • Example: Automated user recognition, personalized greetings, or information-gathering flows.

Subsequent User Interactions with HALO

After the welcome interaction, subsequent conversation handling is carried out dynamically by HALO’s AI agents, optionally using integrated external tools. You define and manage the behavior of these agents and tools via HALO Studio.

AI Agents and Tools Handling

• AI Agents in HALO interact directly with users, providing answers or engaging specialized tools.

• Tools handle specific actions or operations that are triggered by agents (e.g., checking order status, retrieving data, validating user details).

Agent Interaction Completion Behavior

Agents in HALO can finalize interactions in one of three ways:

• Completion

  • Indicates a successful end of the interaction, resetting agent state for fresh interactions.

  • Positive logging outcome (successful user experience).

• Breakout

  • An unsuccessful end of an interaction, often due to inability to resolve customer requests.

  • Negative logging outcome (used for diagnosing and improving).

• Agent Handover

  • Transfers the ongoing interaction explicitly to another specialized AI agent.

  • Helpful when complex interactions require different agents with relevant specialization.

All these behavior types can be directly configured and monitored within HALO Studio.

Fallback Handling of Interactions

When interactions reach completion states (especially breakouts), fallback strategies ensure smooth user experience. HALO supports two fallback types, configured via HALO Studio:

• Static Fallback Flow

  • Presents pre-determined fallback messaging clearly conveying helpful next steps.

  • Example: "Unfortunately I'm unable to assist with this issue. Please contact our support at support@example.com."

• Dynamic Fallback Flow (Tool)

  • Triggers a dynamic fallback tool to proactively handle situations gracefully.

  • Can escalate directly to human agents if appropriate.

Answer Processing Pipeline

HALO ensures the quality, security, and appropriateness of every interaction through a powerful validation pipeline, managed within HALO Studio:

1. Prompt Injection Validation

   • Secures interactions against unsafe or malicious inputs.

2. Optional Language Detection

   • Determines user language to support multilingual answering.

3. Custom Guardrails (Optional Per-Agent)

   • Ensures answers strictly conform with defined guidelines specific to each agent.

   • For successful agent handovers, guardrails apply only on the receiving agent side when generating the final response, bypassing prior-agent guardrails during handover.

4. Answer Generation

   • HALO derives responses directly via agents or external tools.

5. Answer Styling & Optional Automatic Translations

   • Adapts responses to brand, tone-of-voice, or incites automatic translation based on detected language.

6. Feedback Application

   • Continually improves answers by applying real customer or agent feedback from past interactions.

Managing Conversational Flows in HALO Studio

All the aspects described above—interactions, agent behaviors, tool integrations, fallbacks, validations, and pipelines—are configured, monitored, and refined within the HALO Studio CMS.

Use HALO Studio to:

• Easily configure and update welcome and fallback strategies.

• Monitor agent interactions closely through detailed analytics.

• Continually enhance HALO’s effectiveness with feedback-driven improvements.