Please forgive the completely noob question.
Background: I am not a developer - at best a hobby programmer who has enough knowledge to be dangerous/useful to my superiors. The AWS/Cloud expert at my company just left, gave me a 30 minutes whirlwind tour of AWS and said I'm now the expert...
AWS Cloudformation allows me to provide (basically) a "user" utterance that signifies Positive/Negative Feedback from the user of the bot: WebAppConfNegativeFeedback WebAppConfPositiveFeedback.
How do I process those utterances to provide useful information to improve the bot's responses?
It's stateless, so I'm not sure how to grab the context of the question and feedback to notify our company that some question provided a bad answer (good answer not so important.)
Any help you can provide, at least to point to me how to interpret this information is more than welcome. I hate feeling like a fish out of water...
Hi there and sorry to hear about your predicament.
AWS Cloudformation is a tool set that allows a developer to script the creation of resources; Cloudformation itself is not processing your user's requests.
As you've alluded to, AWS Lex is the service that is used to interact with users.
Here's a link to the Getting Started guide which I hope will help you get a better understanding of just how Lex works so that the rest of this answer makes more sense.
Essentially Lex uses a combination of intents with slots to complete a task. An intent uses utterances as an entry point to understanding what action a user wants to take while slots are used to collect the detail surrounding that action.
As an example, we could have an utterance "set my alarm clock" that activates an intent called SetAlarm. We then need to ask the user for the time that they'd like the alarm to be set for. This value is store in a slot of type date.
We then harness the power of AWS Lambda functions to 'fulfill' the intent. In this case, we will use the given information to set the alarm at the user's specified time.
With regards to your scenario, I am making an assumption that you have two fields called WebAppConfNegativeFeedback and WebAppConfPositiveFeedback somewhere in your Cloudformation script. These contain positive and negative utterances respectively. Again, making an assumption then that these fields are used to either build a Lex bot or it could be that these values are used in a supporting Lambda function to categorise the utterance as either positive or negative.
If it is a case that you have a Lambda function, you should be able to use that function to fire all another process should it be determined that the user's interaction was negative. That process could be an email to a support team etc. The Lambda function would have the conversation state passed in as an argument. You could interrogate this argument to get the context of the conversation.
Please provide more insight if you can so that a more specific answer can be provided.