Charlotte Bots and AI meetup from November 2016. Discusses building conversational chatbots and available options for developers.

1. Building Conversational Bots
Charlotte Bots and AI Meetup
Nov’ 16
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2. Introduction
Ramu Pulipati
botsplash.com
Helps build and launch conversational bots
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3. Agenda
• Bots Background
– Bot Conversations
– Bot Kinds
– Platforms
• Building Bots
– Frameworks
– Build your own
• Best practices
– Bot personality
– Following through
– Smart Bots
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4. Bot Conversation Basics
• Human to human
• Human to bot directly (Facebook, Skype)
• Human to human with Bot in the mentions or
sideline (Google Allo, Slack)
• Bot to human – notifications (Facebook, Slack)
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5. Bot Kinds
• Universal AI trained bots
– Google Allo, Facebook M, Siri, Cortana
– No Integration support
• Voice only / Text based integration platforms
– Amazon Alexa, Skype
– Voice enabled, limited integrations
• Domain or business specific Bots
– Slack, Facebook, Kik and Microsoft Teams?
– OS platform as native app alternative (limited
functionality)
– Usually based on workflow, NLP and domain focused
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6. Platforms
• Software as services
– Closed platforms with bots: Slack, Facebook,
Skype, Gitter
– Platforms without bots: Snapchat
• Hosted platforms
– Open Source: Rocket chat, Matter Most, Zulip
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7. Bot frameworks
• Proprietary end to end solutions
– API.ai, Motion.ai, Wit.ai, Botsplash.com
(managed)
• AI Machine Learning services
– IBM Watson, MS Cognitive Services, Alieyn
• Libraries
– MS Bot Framework, Botkit
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8. Build your own
• For advanced and complex handling of
business scenarios
• Enables to target a specific platform using full
potential
• Easy to build simple and focused bots
• Managing context, workflow, NLP and
Machine Learning would make it complicated
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9. How to get started?
• Start with platform tutorial (first timer)
• Understand platform capabilities and libraries
• Create a user workflow
– Identify input fields and output
– List the different flows to reach the output
– Write down interaction sessions
• User testing and collect improvements
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10. Bot Personality
• Use direct & natural language
• Give personality. Engage in role play.
• Provide users with suggestive responses and
type_on notifications
• Keep message concise and use a/b testing.
• Maintain short term memory and long
memory
• Allow the user to start over anytime
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11. Use Platform Features
• Menu
• Greetings
• Get started
• Share
• Display templates
• Call Phone
• Buy
• Share
• Receipt
• Extensions
• Profile
• Time zone
• Gender
• Targeted promotions
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12. Interaction Analysis
• Provide alternate messages and content flows
• Measure
– Flow dropouts
– Conversions Rate
• Understand
– User geography and focus services
– Usage times
– Notifications
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13. Engagement
• Provide confirmation before placing an order
or confirmation
• Use website as fallback
• Standby support staff for e-commerce
• Give clear option to change subscriptions
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14. Building Smart Bots
• Basic keyword & distance algorithms are not
very effective
• Retrieval vs Generative chatbots
• Natural Language Processing
• Machine learning / AI
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15. Questions?
• Discuss
– Next month meetup agenda
– Upcoming Charlotte events
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ramu@botsplash.com