[Feature Request] URL-addressable Persisted Reentrant Dialog System Contexts

[AdamSobieski]

Hello. As interesting to you, I recently wrote a letter to SIGdial proposing a new “BudgetQA challenge”.

Pertinent to this Bot Framework SDK feature request:

Technical topics also include providing a capability for end-users to be able to save and load dialogue state data into and from URL-addressable slots. With such a capability, end-users could, using a graphical user interface or via dialogue, request to receive a URL for themselves and others to use to enter saved dialogues at points of interest. Points of interest in multimodal dialogues could, for instance, have complex data visualizations displayed on screen.

I would like to request a feature: the capability to obtain URL’s with which to load persisted reentrant dialogue system contexts. In an application-specific manner, some state data would need to be persisted for this type of reentrant context, and other state data would need not be.

As envisioned, end-users would be able to request these URL's at times of their choosing. These URL's could be displayed, clipboarded, and/or emailed to end-users.

This feature would enable end-users to indicate an intent to later reenter a dialogue system context using a provided URL.

This feature would also enable social computing scenarios where end-users could share reentrant multimodal dialogue system contexts with one another. In addition to providing a means of sharing reentrant contexts via hyperlinks, with this capability, developers could more readily provide end-users with social media sharing buttons.

As this feature seems like it would be generally useful, I wanted to request it here. Thank you.