Genesys Cloud - Main

Hello Patrick,

I was going to recommend following the flow through the Flow Execution Replay, but you're already way ahead of me. Do you see any different results if you raise the timeout threshold?

 If this is something that you can easily replicate, I would recommend opening a case with Product Support and sharing the case number with me so that I can monitor the issue internally.

Try clearing that slot before the ask. 

Eric,

Thank you for the idea. The support engineer also made this same suggestion but making that addition did not resolve the issue. 

Also, just to note, at the point where this Ask for Slot action is hit and causes the unexpected behavior, it is the first time for this slot in this bot flow, and the first time that this bot flow has been called at all. So, in theory, there shouldn't already be an old value in that slot. 

I appreciate your response, though.

Try clearing that slot before the ask. 

Hi Patrick, just a small suggestion here, maybe it helps.

Since you mentioned that this is the first time this particular Bot Flow is called, you might want to take a look at your Inbound Message Flow at the point where this Bot Flow is called.

I remember having an issue in the past (that's like 2+ years ago, so I might not recall all the details), if I called a Bot Flow while passing an input variable in the "Bot Input Text" field.. As the first Ask For Slot in that Bot flow would use the value in that variable as the first input from the customer... Or something like that..

So if you haven't yet, try to remove any value from being inputed there (In case you have any)

------------------------------
Marcello Jabur
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Original Message:
Sent: 07-22-2026 17:19
From: Patrick Rohlf
Subject: Ask for Slot not prompting or waiting for a customer response

Eric,

Thank you for the idea. The support engineer also made this same suggestion but making that addition did not resolve the issue. 

Also, just to note, at the point where this Ask for Slot action is hit and causes the unexpected behavior, it is the first time for this slot in this bot flow, and the first time that this bot flow has been called at all. So, in theory, there shouldn't already be an old value in that slot. 

I appreciate your response, though.

------------------------------
Patrick Rohlf
Contact Center Technologies Implementation Engineer
------------------------------



Original Message:
Sent: 07-22-2026 16:44
From: Eric Berkshire
Subject: Ask for Slot not prompting or waiting for a customer response

Try clearing that slot before the ask. 

------------------------------
Eric Berkshire
NA
------------------------------

Marcello,

Thank you for your response. You are awesome!

This put me on the right path for finding a solution. Even though I was: (1) passing the expected slot value from the Bot Input Text field in the originating Inbound Call Flow AND (2) the Ask For Slot was the first Ask action being hit in the Bot Flow (which accurately follows the support documentation), this was always resulting in the unexpected caller experience which I noted in my first post.

So, the documentation around the Bot Input Text field and the first Ask for action being hit was partially true for my Bot Flow. It was processing the response for the first Ask for Slot, but then not handling the prompting for the second Ask for Slot. I'm not sure how these two actions would be tied together, but it was clearly happening. And adding an Ask for Intent in front of that first Ask for Slot immediately solved the problem.

Maybe because the first Ask for Slot action didn't need to trigger prompt audio (since it already had a value for that first Ask for Slot), the TTS engine wasn't triggering correctly for the second Ask for Slot action?

The way that I got around this was to create a new Ask for Intent action and to have that be hit before the Ask for Slot which is what was really driving the caller experience for this particular bot flow. 

Thanks, everyone, for your input and assistance. Cheers!

------------------------------
Patrick Rohlf
Contact Center Technologies Implementation Engineer
------------------------------


Original Message:
Sent: 07-23-2026 19:18
From: Marcello Jabur
Subject: Ask for Slot not prompting or waiting for a customer response

Hi Patrick, just a small suggestion here, maybe it helps.

Since you mentioned that this is the first time this particular Bot Flow is called, you might want to take a look at your Inbound Message Flow at the point where this Bot Flow is called.

I remember having an issue in the past (that's like 2+ years ago, so I might not recall all the details), if I called a Bot Flow while passing an input variable in the "Bot Input Text" field.. As the first Ask For Slot in that Bot flow would use the value in that variable as the first input from the customer... Or something like that..

So if you haven't yet, try to remove any value from being inputed there (In case you have any)

------------------------------
Marcello Jabur
------------------------------



Original Message:
Sent: 07-22-2026 17:19
From: Patrick Rohlf
Subject: Ask for Slot not prompting or waiting for a customer response

Eric,

Thank you for the idea. The support engineer also made this same suggestion but making that addition did not resolve the issue. 

Also, just to note, at the point where this Ask for Slot action is hit and causes the unexpected behavior, it is the first time for this slot in this bot flow, and the first time that this bot flow has been called at all. So, in theory, there shouldn't already be an old value in that slot. 

I appreciate your response, though.

------------------------------
Patrick Rohlf
Contact Center Technologies Implementation Engineer
------------------------------




Original Message:
Sent: 07-22-2026 16:44
From: Eric Berkshire
Subject: Ask for Slot not prompting or waiting for a customer response

Try clearing that slot before the ask. 

------------------------------
Eric Berkshire
NA
------------------------------

For posterity, here is the final write-up from the Genesys support engineer, in the hopes that it might help another community member in the future...

Why "Ask for Intent" Solved the Prompt Skipping Issue

Your intuition about how Bot Input Text affected the TTS pipeline was right on the mark.

• The Mechanism: When you pass a string in Bot Input Text from an inbound call flow, Architect immediately processes that text against the very first Ask for ...action in the bot flow.
• The Glitch: When that first action was an Ask for Slot, Genesys evaluated the Bot Input Text, successfully filled the slot without needing to play the first prompt, and immediately advanced to the second Ask for Slot. However, because the TTS audio stream was never initialized on turn 1, the bot engine bypassed prompt playback on turn 2 as well-essentially treating the session as if it were still in a non-prompting state.
• The Fix: Inserting an Ask for Intent as the lead action forces the bot engine into a full intent-recognition dialog state.
• Bot Input Text triggers the intent classification, and when control moves to your Ask for Slot, the audio player pipeline initializes properly and plays the prompt as expected.

----------------------------------------------------------------

I replied with a suggestion for updating the documentation and/or hint callout for 'Bot Input Text' field...

I don't know what the internal process is for requesting updates to support documentation, but I think that this situation deserves consideration. I spent days with a broken flow which I spent many hours troubleshooting. I ended up needing to create a support ticket, which you had to spend hours supporting.

Bottom line: Much would have been resolved if in the 'Bot Input Text' hint/documentation, it stated... "Supplies an initial utterance to the bot that will be processed by the first Ask action executed in the bot flow. {additional callout} Note: it is suggested that an Ask for Intent action is the first Ask action executed in the Bot Flow, so that the TTS audio stream is initialized correctly within the Bot Flow."

If this one extra sentence existed, there would have been a lot of time saved on both sides. And it would help any future users who might run into the same issue.