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 Intents in 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.