Digital Assistant Design and Building
Domain 1 - Digital Assistant Design and Building. The exam tests how you compose skills into a digital assistant: message routing, versioning, variable scope, and publishing. Questions are scenario-shaped - a bot answers with the wrong skill, or a channel serves stale behaviour - so learn the boundary between the digital assistant and its skills.
Assistant vs skill
A skill holds the conversation logic: flows, entities, and the intents trained inside it. The digital assistant holds routing: DA-level start intents mapped to skills, plus global handling for exit, help and unresolved messages. To let a user reach a skill you add that skill as a handler for a DA intent, or mark it to auto-start when the session begins. A routing intent that exists only inside the skill is invisible to the DA, so the message falls through.
Versions and variables
Skills and DAs are both versioned. A channel points at a DA version that must be active; editing the draft changes nothing for users until you publish and activate. Variables have three scopes: flow (one flow run), session (one conversation) and user (persisted across conversations for that user). DA-level variables are visible inside skills; skill variables are not visible to the DA unless you surface them. Keep turn-by-turn state in session or flow scope and reserve user scope for durable preferences.
Worked example
A user types “where is my order”. You create a DA intent OrderStatus with varied utterances and add it as a start trigger for the OrderStatus skill. Inside the skill, the chosen order number goes into a flow variable; the authenticated customer id goes into a session variable so follow-ups like “the other one” resolve. Storing the order number at user scope is the bug: tomorrow's conversation would silently reuse a stale order.
Traps
Routing intent trained inside the skill but never registered on the DA; publishing the skill but not activating the new DA version; using user scope for conversational state; assuming the DA can read a skill-local variable directly.