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Re:Challenges you’re going to face when building a chatbot by Rabidgremlin on Tuesday January 03, 2017 @01:31PM (#13311602)
Check out https://github.com/rabidgremlin/Mutters

It uses ML to figure out the "intent" of what the user has said (using a document classifier) and named entity recognition (NER) to extract data from the text (date, location etc).

That is actually the easy part. The harder part is the conversation scripting and state handling. Mutters uses the Ink narration engine (originally designed for dialogue heavy games) for this.

It works pretty well. IMHO :)

Re:Challenges you’re going to face when building a chatbot by hallman76 on Tuesday January 03, 2017 @09:34PM (#13315217)
Cool - thanks for sharing!

I played around with Mycroft's Adapt Intent Parser[0] a couple weeks ago. It's written in Python. I was looking for something open source to replace IBM Watson's Conversation API.

With Mycroft working I quickly realized that I'd need some way to deal with state handling and conversation branching. I don't think Mycroft has a counterpart to the Ink narration component - I'm really curious to dig into that!

[0] https://github.com/MycroftAI/adapt

Re:Challenges you’re going to face when building a chatbot by samcodes on Tuesday January 03, 2017 @11:35PM (#13315708)
Other services and projects:

There are hosted services like API.ai, wit.ai and Microsoft LUIS. Init.ai has NLP built into their bot building platform. Rasa NLU is an open source NLP project that is very interesting.

Re:Challenges you’re going to face when building a chatbot by adamra on Thursday January 05, 2017 @08:22AM (#13326870)
I'm curious if some of those platforms allow to write custom code for processing of the raw message. Either to embed the code directly on their server or to expose a custom webhook. For instance, if I were to write such a diagnostic chatbot as described in the article but would prefer to use a service such as those to take care of the integrations with various platforms, message queueing, tracking basic stats etc.