Hi Vinaya,
What you're seeing is most likely intentional behavior in the Genesys Cloud Dialogue Engine, specifically for values semantically interpreted as phone numbers.
Even though both cases use numeric input:
- account numbers are treated as generic identifiers
- phone numbers trigger additional telephony/PII handling
That is why you see behaviors such as:
- automatic formatting (
123-456-7890)
- partial confirmation (last 4 digits only)
This appears to be tied more to the slot/entity interpretation than to the numeric length itself.
Important distinction
The behavior is not simply:
but rather:
- "10 digits recognized as a phone number context"
which activates normalization/privacy-friendly confirmation logic.
About future impact on other numeric slots
Based on current behavior, I would not expect:
- account numbers
- customer IDs
- generic numeric identifiers
to suddenly inherit the same formatting behavior unless they are explicitly interpreted/classified as phone-related entities.
Your workaround
Using:
Ask Slot- custom regex slots
- or treating the value as generic numeric text
is probably the safest approach when:
- exact formatting preservation is required
- full digit confirmation is mandatory
especially for authentication or validation scenarios.
My recommendation
If you need:
- deterministic capture
- exact replay/confirmation
- no automatic masking/formatting
I would avoid semantic "phone number" interpretation entirely and instead use:
- custom slot types
- regex-based validation
- or generic numeric/text collection.
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Gabriel Garcia
NA
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Original Message:
Sent: 05-05-2026 11:42
From: Vinaya Mente
Subject: Genesys Bot
Unexpected Behavior with Phone Number Slot Formatting in Genesys Dialogue Engine Bots
We've run into an unusual behavior with the Genesys Dialogue Engine bots and wanted to check if others have seen the same.
We created a numeric slot (builtin) and tagged it in an intent designed to collect phone numbers. For example, the utterance: "My phone number is 1234567890."
When the bot uses Ask for Intent to collect the phone number, the response is automatically formatted as 123-456-7890. During confirmation, the bot only asks about the last four digits, which isn't ideal.
Interestingly, this doesn't happen with other numeric slots. For instance, when we use a 10‑digit numeric slot for account numbers, the formatting issue doesn't occur. It seems to be specific to slots tagged as phone numbers.
As a workaround, we're currently using the Ask Slot block for phone numbers, which avoids the formatting problem. But we'd like to know:
- Is this a known issue with phone number numeric built-in slots?
- Should we expect similar behavior with other 10‑digit numeric slots in the future?
Any insights or confirmation from the community would be really helpful
#Architect
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Vinaya Mente
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