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Bottery – A conversational agent prototyping platform

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Re: Bottery – A conversational agent prototyping platform

#61

Post by Rabidgremlin »

Diederich wrote: post #57
Rabidgremlin wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been building/running a pretty successful chatbot for a large corporate for over a year now. We use Inkles Ink to script the conversation flows and maintain state. Works very very well. https://github.com/inkle/ink

Neat, so I just read through ink and its tutorial. Can you briefly describe the kinds of things you use it for in a large corporation? Thanks!

Sure.. it is used to manage all the conversational flows and state for a chatbot. We use it for both branching conversations flows and goal based flows. Ink is simple enough that our content writers can work directly with it and we get clean separation of content and code.

The bot itself is pretty interesting. It has 350+ conversation flows, largely dealing with customer service for a business with fairly complicated products and business rules.

The bot is plumbed into 7 odd channels and has to deal with channel specific answers (eg if you are in the mobile app or the self-service portal then the answer on how to do something is different from how to do it if you are on the website's home page).

Additionally it has to handle regional specific answers, so the bots answers are country specific as well.

And it deals with logged in and not logged in states too :)

This all makes for an interesting content management problem (40k words) that our use of Ink readily solves.

Currently bot has 68% conversation success rate. E.g. 68% of the time he is able to resolve the customers issue which we think is pretty good considering the wide domain we are dealing with and the very strange edge cases the industry we are in has.

Re: Bottery – A conversational agent prototyping platform

#62

Post by Rabidgremlin »

jaymzcampbell wrote: post #56
Rabidgremlin wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been building/running a pretty successful chatbot for a large corporate for over a year now. We use Inkles Ink to script the conversation flows and maintain state. Works very very well. https://github.com/inkle/ink

Inkle/Ink looks awesome and a lot of fun - thanks for sharing that! Mutters looks like a really cool use of the tech btw.

Thanks!

Re: Bottery – A conversational agent prototyping platform

#63

Post by drusepth »

staticautomatic wrote: post #28

Has anyone built a bot for forums? I would LOVE to see a forum where all the threads were started by bots and contained bot conversations on whatever topics.

You might be interested in /r/SubredditSimulator [1], where only bots are allowed to post and each bot there has been trained off a single (other) subreddit.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimulator/

Re: Bottery – A conversational agent prototyping platform

#64

Post by atrilumen »

Eridrus wrote: post #7
dpweb wrote: post #5

It's fun using state machines, perfect for bot-making. In learning how to make a Messenger bot, state machine appeared very quickly as the thing to do. Thinking in those terms I would think would be a great way to teach programming.

State machines are a great place to start, but are pretty confining for users. If you've asked a user for some info, they may reasonably want to ask you a question rather than provide that info. You can often get away with a state machine, but it is definitely not the path to natural conversations.

I'm pretty excited about Rasa Core: https://medium.com/rasa-blog/a-new-approach-to-conversationa...

Re: Bottery – A conversational agent prototyping platform

#65

Post by Diederich »

Rabidgremlin wrote: post #61
Diederich wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neat, so I just read through ink and its tutorial. Can you briefly describe the kinds of things you use it for in a large corporation? Thanks!

Sure.. it is used to manage all the conversational flows and state for a chatbot. We use it for both branching conversations flows and goal based flows. Ink is simple enough that our content writers can work directly with it and we get clean separation of content and code. The bot itself is pretty interesting. It has 350+ conversation flows, largely dealing with customer service for a business with fairly complicated…

Ok cool, that maps to what I briefly read about ink much better. I had in mind some kind of 'devops chatbot'.

68% conversion rate is pretty impressive, nicely done! And thanks for the description, it's quite fascinating.

Re: Bottery – A conversational agent prototyping platform

#66

Post by Rabidgremlin »

Diederich wrote: post #65
Rabidgremlin wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure.. it is used to manage all the conversational flows and state for a chatbot. We use it for both branching conversations flows and goal based flows. Ink is simple enough that our content writers can work directly with it and we get clean separation of content and code. The bot itself is pretty interesting. It has 350+ conversation flows, largely dealing with customer service for a business with fairly complicated…

Ok cool, that maps to what I briefly read about ink much better. I had in mind some kind of 'devops chatbot'. 68% conversion rate is pretty impressive, nicely done! And thanks for the description, it's quite fascinating.

Thanks. The really fascinating thing is have a direct "stream of conscience" from our customers. With a 1000+ conversation a day you really get to see the problems they are having with our products, processes, UX etc As well as their responses to things in the news etc. Our product teams love it.

Re: Bottery – A conversational agent prototyping platform

#67

Post by opportune »

azinman2 wrote: post #41

This is a clear example of why “AI” is so overhyped at the moment. Watson, api.ai, etc all use such super basic state machines and transitions that are as far away from “AI” as possible. There’s nothing natural about this conversation, and there’s certainly no understanding or learning happening. It makes me mad that bots are a hot topic given there’s nothing new or revolutionary happening to enable them.

Well, I think this is simply a matter of how you see AI. The colloquial understanding of AI is something that is able to generally "think" like a human. To them, and perhaps to you too, the goal of AI is to emulate a human.

I think to most AI researchers, AI is seen more as a way to "emulate" intelligence to solve problems - usually problems formulated as "generally" as possible. To the AI researcher, if an incredibly complex modeling approach to a problem performs just as well as a very general one, one model is not strictly better than the other (actually, the more general one is almost always is considered to be), even if one may "theoretically" model how the human mind processes the problem more accurately. Likewise, a bot capable of answering general "getter" questions such as "What is the weather?" may not have a sexy or complicated implementation, and yet could be considered good AI for its problem domain, and may in fact be much more useful than a more sohpisticated bot.

There's actually a lot of work being done on chat bots, and I think perhaps you are limiting your understanding of what is being done to tutorials or toy-projects.

Re: Bottery – A conversational agent prototyping platform

#68

Post by joethephish »

Rabidgremlin wrote: post #51
jaymzcampbell wrote: post #3

Creating the rules for it reminds me a little bit of writing a text adventure game from days gone by: ... name: { onEnter: "'What do you want to name your kitten?'", exits: "'*' ->respond_to_name name=INPUT", }, respond_to_name: { onEnterSay: "The kitten purrs happily, I guess it likes the name #/name#!", }, ... The readme for it is nice and detailed which I always appreciate and it's turned me onto http://tracery.io…

I have been building/running a pretty successful chatbot for a large corporate for over a year now. We use Inkles Ink to script the conversation flows and maintain state. Works very very well. https://github.com/inkle/ink

Hey - @joethephish here from inkle! Really cool to to hear that you're using ink for that :) Would love to know more detail about where this is being used if you're able to share!

Re: Bottery – A conversational agent prototyping platform

#69

Post by mtthwmtthw »

jeswin wrote: post #10

Last year, we had built almost the same thing. It's Open Source but unfortunately, haven't added any documentation (will do when I get time) - https://github.com/yak-ai/wild-yak Lessons learnt: - Works much better than AI driven bots at the moment - Don't pretend to do intelligent things. Be just a dumb textbot. - Force people into selecting options as much as you can - When accepting data as text, give an example of…

I don’t agree with your comment about “sticking to text”. Visual components make sense for form filling type transactions, presenting image/text combos like articles, and guiding the user through explicit follow up actions.

Re: Bottery – A conversational agent prototyping platform

#70

Post by Diederich »

Rabidgremlin wrote: post #66
Diederich wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok cool, that maps to what I briefly read about ink much better. I had in mind some kind of 'devops chatbot'. 68% conversion rate is pretty impressive, nicely done! And thanks for the description, it's quite fascinating.

Thanks. The really fascinating thing is have a direct "stream of conscience" from our customers. With a 1000+ conversation a day you really get to see the problems they are having with our products, processes, UX etc As well as their responses to things in the news etc. Our product teams love it.

That's a lot of conversations! Have you considered using some machine learning techniques?
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