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What are guidelines?

Guidelines are a way to customize Duckie’s behavior to match your team’s needs. They are a set of rules that Duckie will follow when handling requests.

You can access guidelines from the Guidelines page in the web app here.

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Types of guidelines

Guidelines are categorized into three types: General, Case Specific, and Usage Specific.

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General Guidelines

General guidelines are applied to all requests. You can think of them as the default behavior of Duckie. Common use cases include:

• Modifying Duckie’s degree of freedom in a conversation
• Changing response length and format
• Adding important information that is relevant to all requests

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Creating a general guideline

Description: General guidelines are set using a Description field. The description will be used throughout Duckie’s response process to help it make decisions and generate responses. Ducklings: You can select which Ducklings will be affected by the guideline, or leave it blank to apply to all Ducklings.

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Case Specific Guidelines

Case specific guidelines are used to modify Duckie’s behavior for specific cases. Common use cases include:

• Dictating how Duckie should handle specific request types (e.g. pricing questions)
• Providing additional context for a specific topic

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Creating a case specific guideline

Case: The Case field is used to identify the specific conditions that will trigger the guideline. Description: The Description field tells Duckie what to do when the case is triggered. Ducklings: You can select which Ducklings will be affected by the guideline, or leave it blank to apply to all Ducklings.

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Response Feedback

Response feedback comes from notes left by users on Duckie’s responses. The feedback is used to inform Duckie’s response on subsequent occurences of similar messages.

Unlike General Guidelines and Case Specific Guidelines, Response Feedback is not created via the web. However, they can be edited or deleted using the same interface.

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Best Practices

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Description

Descriptions should be detailed. Write them as if you are giving instructions to a child. The more information you provide, the better Duckie will be able to follow your instructions.

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Case

Cases should be as specific as possible. For example, instead of using “Pricing questions” as a case, use “When the user asks about pricing for product X” as a case. For more complex cases, we have found that “checklist” style cases are effective.

To learn more about how to create guidelines, reach out to the Duckie team!