I’m still having some trouble teaching the bot what not to do.
For the question “I would like to make an appointment,” only the action buttons for my online booking system and a call button should be displayed. A little text, and that’s it. However, the bot then asks for the date and time of the appointment. It can neither check nor book this information. So this follow-up question is superfluous and useless. I’ve already adjusted the agent instructions quite a bit. But it still slips up every now and then.
Bot response: “To help me assist you: What date, time, and service would you like? (I don’t make direct bookings here—please call or write.)”
If it could actually access my booking system, that would be fantastic. The additional link doesn’t work, though. It probably requires an API or a webhook.
I can automatically transfer my appointments to the event calendar. I wonder if the bot can do anything with that? Perhaps, at least see which time periods are unavailable. I haven’t tested it yet.
I’ve now shared the link from the event calendar widget with the chatbot. I tested whether it could read the events. It can indeed read events, but only from the current day. It does this even when I switch the calendar to the week or month view. If it could read an entire week or month, that would be a step forward, and an API from my booking system would be unnecessary. My booking system provides me with an .ical file that I import into Google to access the event calendar widget. That would be the way to do it.
What I noticed is that the prompts in your instructions are in both English and German. We recommend using only one language (preferably English, as the bot follows English instructions more accurately).
Thus, if the issue still persist on your end, please try to use only 1 language in the instruction and let me know if it helped
Regarding the event reading, I checked your widget and found that only a link to your website is added, but there are no events listed on that page. Could you clarify where you’ve added the link to the Event Calendar widget?
I’ve just tested it and it didn’t work even for a current date. Our devs will check if anything can be done with it and I’ll update you once I have any news
I believe my plan is doomed to failure. The event calendar widget uses a calendar subscribed to in Google. This displays the dates from my booking system.
So far, so good. However, what I hadn’t considered is that neither holidays, sick days, nor weekends are shown.
Even if the AI chatbot can read and interpret the times with existing appointments, it would then interpret all other times as free appointments. That’s simply not correct.
It seems that you’re right! When importing events from the Google Calendar, the Event Calendar just pulls the events from the GC and the AI Chatbot won’t be able to identify weekends and holidays as unavailable slots, since the widget isn’t designed as a booking system.
Anyway, our devs will check if the chatbot can scrape the calendar beyond the current date and I’ll let you know about the results
Unfortunately, Web Pages training method is not designed to work with structured dynamic data, so currently it is not possible to read information about free slots in the calendar.
I hope this explains things.
If you have any questions left, we’re always here to help
