Actions

Actions are used to trigger Maven App execution to respond to a user question. The LLM chooses which Action to execute based on the question and the current state of the conversation.

Most customers will add Actions to their Agent by installing existing Maven Apps via the App Marketplace. For advanced use cases, Actions can also be created using the Maven API.

Example

The Weatherapi App is a simple app, written by Maven which provides 2 actions when installed:

  • Get the current weather
  • Get a 7 day weather forecast

If a user asks to “reset my password”, that phrase is not at all related to the weather, and so no actions will be called.

But if the user asks for “how hot is it in Boston?”, the get current weather action will be called and the data returned to the LLM. The user will receive a response similar to “It’s 80F”.

On the conversation page for this last example Maven will display that the action was called as well as exactly what data came back from the action code. Note that the action response is never shown directly to the user. Action responses are usually JSON or another machine-readable format. The response is always given to the LLM first.

Actions vs Triggers

Action code is only called in response to a user question, deciding whether an action is called is handled by the LLM. Actions are used to get or update information on behalf of users.

Trigger code is called in response to an event. Trigger code execution is usually used for data reporting - e.g. exporting to a BI tool like Snowflake or updating a Zendesk ticket with a specific tag whenever a user clicks thumbs down.

Action States

Actions can be in one of three states:

  • Pinned: The Action will always be provided to the LLM.
  • Included: The Action will be provided to the the LLM if it is relevant to the user question.
  • Excluded: The Action is disabled and will not be provided to the LLM.

Tuning Actions

When a customer asks a question, Maven will find relevant Actions and provide them to the LLM.

These relevant Actions include all Actions which are Pinned as well as any actions whose description field is similar to the user question. The original description field is provided by the Maven App which created the Action. However, this field can be overridden on the Action Details page if the description does not match your business logic needs.

  • Actions: The Actions page displays all Actions created by the user. Actions can be bulk selected to change their state.

  • Action Details: Clicking on a row in the Actions table opens the Action Details page. This page displays the full Action text and allows editing of the Action description.