COMP9313 - Cognitive services: Chatbot development

Cognitive Services - Chatbots

Conversational services: interact with users using natural language expressions, both voice and text, designed to mimic human interaction.

Use software services to serve user services.

Chatbot Architecture

Chatbot Architecture

NL processor: Structured utterance.
Mapper: Get entities by intent.
Conversation engine: Executable actions(Call API).

Chatbot Development/Design Techniques

• Rule based(Deterministic): Defining statistic rules to dictate the behaviour of chatbot.
• Flow based(Deterministic): Designing the conversation by using UI components(No codes).
• Machine learning based(Probability): Training ML models to predict user intention and extra entities.

Flow Based Chatbots - Characteristics

• Quick bootstraping
• No coding(Design the conversation using cards/buttons/etc)
• Fast and accurate(If...else...)
• Could be smart enough if bot developer anticipates possible situations(flows).
• For simple use cases.

Flow based components

• Card: It is the most basic building component of a bot. It can contain anything from a simple text message, carousel, quick replies, image and other plugins.
• Text: A text card can only contain text and a maximum of three buttons.
• Quick reply: Allow you to get message recipient input by sending buttons in a message.
• Gallery/Carousel: It allows you to send multiple images, titles and multiple links for each element.
• Block: It consists of one or more message cards that are sent together to a bot user. You can link blocks with each other using buttons in text cards or in gallery cards.