Advanced – many questions in one request

The Advanced node asks Laya many questions about the same text in one request: any mix of yes/no (noul), choice and score questions. Because all questions share one request, seven questions take hardly longer than one. In our demo, seven decisions per e-mail took about 30–40 ms in the robot.

When to use Advanced

• You want to know several things about the same text: department, topic, urgency, sentiment, refund, cancellation …
• You want to check answers against each other. Example: ask for the topic and the department separately and only continue automatically if both fit together.
• The questions or choices are built dynamically from the message.
• You need a Laya feature that the simple nodes do not expose. Every option of Laya’s question format is passed through.

Settings

Input

Output

Options

Writing the questions

Double-click the node to open the editor. A new node contains an example inside /* … */. To use it, delete the two lines with /* and */.

📷 Image placeholder: Screenshot of the Advanced node’s code editor with the example questions.

Format

The questions are an object. Each key is a name you choose. It appears again in the result. Each value describes one question in Laya’s format:

{
  "department": {
    "type": "choice",
    "instructions": "Which department is responsible?",
    "criteria": {
      "Sales": "offers and prices",
      "Support": "technical problems and login",
      "Billing": "invoices, payments and refunds"
    }
  },
  "urgency": {
    "type": "score",
    "instructions": "How urgent is the request?",
    "criteria": ["not at all", "slightly", "moderately", "very", "extremely"]
  },
  "refund": {
    "type": "noul",
    "instructions": "Does the customer ask for a refund?"
  }
}

Up to 64 questions per request. The node only checks type and instructions. Everything else is checked by Laya, which explains its reason if something is wrong. The rules from the single nodes apply here too: see Choice for good choices and Score for good levels.

Placeholders: values from the message

Write {{field}} or {{msg.field}} anywhere in a text, like in Robomotion’s SQL nodes. Nested fields work with dots: {{customer.name}}.

{
  "topic": {
    "type": "choice",
    "instructions": "What is the message about {{product}}?",
    "criteria": "{{categories}}"
  }
}

JavaScript

The editor also accepts JavaScript, like the Function node. msg is available. You can either write an expression that results in the object, or a function body with return:

var q = {
  urgency: { type: "score", instructions: "How urgent is the request?",
             criteria: ["not at all", "slightly", "moderately", "very", "extremely"] }
};
 
// add a refund question only for e-mails to the shop address
if (msg.email.to === "shop@example.com") {
  q.refund = { type: "noul", instructions: "Does the customer ask for a refund?" };
}
 
return q;

Result

Result is Laya’s full answer, unchanged. Access the answers by the names you chose:

msg.laya.answers.department.choice      // "Billing"
msg.laya.answers.urgency.score          // 3.1
msg.laya.answers.refund.noul            // 0.98

{
  "model": "laya-rl-agent",
  "answers": {
    "department": {
      "type": "choice", "choice": "Billing",
      "probabilities": { "Sales": 0.0001, "Support": 0.0002, "Billing": 0.9997 },
      "confidence": 0.997, "answer_confidence": 0.9997, "action": { "act_probability": 1.0 }
    },
    "urgency": {
      "type": "score", "score": 3.1,
      "legend": { "0": "not at all", "1": "slightly", "2": "moderately", "3": "very", "4": "extremely" },
      "probabilities": { "0": 0.01, "1": 0.05, "2": 0.17, "3": 0.36, "4": 0.41 },
      "confidence": 0.4, "answer_confidence": 0.41, "action": { "act_probability": 1.0 }
    },
    "refund": {
      "type": "noul", "noul": 0.98, "confidence": 0.98, "answer_confidence": 0.98,
      "action": { "act_probability": 1.0 }
    }
  },
  "usage": { "input_tokens": 226, "truncated": false, "...": "…" },
  "routing": { "model": "multilingual", "...": "…" }
}

The meaning of each field is described in the Noul, Choice and Score articles.

Example: self-check with two questions

Ask for the topic and the department separately. Only if both fit together, the message is routed automatically. Otherwise a human decides.

// Function node after Advanced
var A = msg.laya.answers;
var departmentOf = {
  "Double charge": "Billing",
  "Login problem": "Support",
  "Price quote": "Sales"
};
 
if (departmentOf[A.topic.choice] === A.department.choice) {
  msg.route = A.department.choice;
} else {
  msg.route = "Human review";
}
 
return msg;

Batch mode

With Batch on, every record in Text gets all questions. This is the fastest way to process many texts: our demo flow handled 1,000 e-mails with 7 questions each in about 17 seconds.

Step 1 – build one record per e-mail in a Function node before Advanced:

msg.records = {};
msg.emails.forEach(function (e) {
  msg.records[String(e.id)] = { subject: e.subject, body: e.body };
});
return msg;

Step 2 – set Text to msg.records and turn on Batch.

Step 3 – read the results. They keep the IDs:

msg.laya["17"].answers.department.choice

Loop over the results in one Function node instead of looping over the Laya node. With a list as input, the result is a list in the same order. Up to 64 records go into one request, more are split automatically.

Errors