News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Lessons learned from building a commercial open-source bot development platform. Parent comment

Re:Lessons learned from building a commercial open-source bo... by softmodeling on Friday July 03, 2020 @04:43PM (#23727412)
If you head to the examples page (https://xatkit.com/chatbot-examples/) you will see other examples of bots.

It's true the one in our home page is a bot to illustrate a simple scenario with some of the features that Xatkit includes (if you ask the bot for a demo)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Lessons learned from building a commercial open-source bo... by Animats on Friday July 03, 2020 @08:05PM (#23728786) 

    Hi there.
    I can help you get up to speed with a REST API
    Just give me the URL of the OpenAPI definition of your API

    > What is an example of an OpenAPI definition?

    Loading the API from . Please wait...
     Oops, I couldn't parse your definition
    Here is the error message:
    no protocol: Xatkit
What do you recommend that can hold an interesting conversation?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Lessons learned from building a commercial open-source bo... by softmodeling on Saturday July 04, 2020 @01:14AM (#23730299)
I don't think the goal of a bot is having an interesting conversation. The goal is to help you accomplish a task (get your answer, do something for you,...).

Clearly, in the above example, you didn't provide what the bot was expecting and since the bot is a research prototype, it had not enough training to identify that you were not providing an API file but asking a clarification question.

No, the bot owner should the dashboard to realize that a user (you) asked this question that made the bot failed and should prepare a new version of the bot that can answer it

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Lessons learned from building a commercial open-source bo... by Animats on Saturday July 04, 2020 @07:44PM (#23735674)
Ask "where's an example", and they point you at something a customer did. Ask why the example is unimpressive, and they blame that customer.

In chatbot systems, the machinery doesn't do very much. It's anticipating almost all possible user responses that makes the thing work, if it does. All the engine really does is take the user's question and match it to some big FAQ file someone put in. Plus there's some kind of phone-tree like path to guide users through whatever the chatbot wants them to go. (Not where the user wants to go.)

In game development, this is called The Dev Team Thinks of Everything.[1]

[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DevelopersForesi...

[ Parent | on HN ]