Follow-up intents

You can use follow-up intents to automatically set contexts for pairs of intents. A follow-up intent is a child of its associated parent intent. When you create a follow-up intent, an output context is automatically added to the parent intent and an input context of the same name is added to the follow-up intent. A follow-up intent is only matched when the parent intent is matched in the previous conversational turn. You can also create multiple levels of nested follow-up intents.

Dialogflow provides many predefined follow-up intents for common end-user replies like "yes", "no", or "cancel". You can also create your own follow-up intents to handle custom replies.

For example, a hair stylist agent might have the following nested intents.

Intent name	Training phrase	Input context	Output context	Intent response
Appointment	Hello		appointment-followup	Would you like to make an appointment?
⤷ Appointment - yes	Yes	appointment-followup	appointment-yes-followup	Would you like a haircut?
⤷ Haircut - yes	Yes	appointment-yes-followup		Your appointment is set.
⤷ Haircut - no	No	appointment-yes-followup		Goodbye.
⤷ Appointment - no	No	appointment-followup		Goodbye.

Where to find this data

When building an agent, it is most common to use the Dialogflow ES Console ( visit documentation , open console ). The instructions below focus on using the console. To access intent data:

1. Go to the Dialogflow ES Console .
2. Select an agent.
3. Select Intentsin the left sidebar menu.

If you are building an agent using the API instead of the console, see the Intents reference . The API field names are similar to the console field names.

Create a follow-up intent

To create a follow-up intent:

1. From the intent list, hover your mouse pointer over the desired parent intent.
2. Click Add follow-up intent.
3. Select one of the predefined follow-up intents, or choose custom. The predefined follow-up intents already include training phrases for expected end-user replies.