BOTS!

Eric Jernigan, Manager of Application Development

Mississippi Interactive

RISE OF THE BOTS

Over 4 billion users around the world are using

instant messaging platforms

6 out of the top 10 apps used globally are

messaging apps

Messaging has now overtaken social networking

applications

POTENTIAL USE CASES

• Troubleshooting

• New user on-boarding

• Response suggestion

Customer Service Purchasing Help Desk Employee Support

• Cross Selling

• Product Suggestions

• Improving search

• FAQ

• Account Lookup

• Tracking

• Statistics

• App Insights

• Vacation time

• Meeting room booking

• Routine tasks

WHAT MAKES A GREAT BOT?

Easily solves user’s problem (and efficiently)

Better than alternative experiences

Runs where ever the user is

Natural / Intuitive to use

BOTS ARE PEOPLE TOO

Create a personality around your bot.

Mimic ways that people actually talk to each other.

Build experiences when interfacing with customers.

What is your Bots job?

HOW TO MAKE A BOT

Bot Frameworks

• RASA Core

• Dexter

• Microsoft Bot Framework

Build one bot

Host one bot

Maintain one bot

Target multiple channels

BUILDING A CONVERSATION

Build a flow diagram to test your conversation

A core principle in Bot design are Intents and Entities

These are parts of a conversation which encapsulates behavior similarly to screens in a traditional UI

REPRESENTATIONS VS UNDERSTANDING

Sentiment analysis / Machine translation

“king is to man as queen is to _____”

When AI can’t determine what “it” refers to in a sentence, it’s hard to believe that it will take over the world.

NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSOR (NLP)

NLP (Natural language processing) is the science of extracting the intention of text and relevant information from text.

Taking raw human language and return the basic parts of speech, nouns, verbs, dates, sentence structures.

NLP Platforms help developers create language capabilities in the least amount of time possible.

NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSOR (NLP)

Some popular NLP as a service platforms are:

1. LUIS.ai — By Microsoft

2. ASK (Alexa Skills Kit) - Amazon

3. Api.ai / Dialogflow— By Google

4. Watson — By IBM

5. RASA NLU

INTENTS

Intents are the intentions of the end-user and can typically be placed into 2 categories

1. Casual Intents

2. Business Intents

CASUAL INTENTS

Casual Intents can be defined as “Small Talk”

Casual Intents can also comprise of both positive and negative affirmations

Greeting Positive Negative

• Hi

• Bye

• Ok

• Yes Please

• No

• You stupid human

BUSINESS INTENTS

Intents that directly map to the business of the bot

• What is the score of the Broncos game?

When naming your intent try and use a understandable name

• GetScoreByTeamIntent

ENTITIES

The “metadata” of your Business intent

What’s the score of the Broncos game?

“Broncos” are the team for which the user “intends” to find the “score”

The process of finding entities can be understood as Part of Sentence (POS) tagging.

Like Intent naming. Take care of labeling and identifying your entities.

COMPOSITE ENTITIES

Having more than one entity inside it

For ex: Find me a Red Ferrari Convertible for sale

Composite: CarDetail

Intent - SearchCarIntent

Entities:

Make: Ferrari

Color: RedComponent:

Model: Convertible

TRAINING

3 Simple Rules for Intent and Entity Training:

1. You can never train it enough. Get more data, train more data

2. You can never train it enough. Get more data, train more data

3. You can never train it enough. Get more data, train more data

TRAINING

Ideally one should train the NLP with some real data.

• Great place to use existing chat logs, Facebook posts, Slack conversations.

Manufactured utterances are ok to bootstrap.

what was the release year of the movie Frozen

in which year was Top Gun was released

when did Star Wars came ( Poor English is sometimes encouraged )

who was that guy in the movie Braveheart

LEARNING PHASES

Supervised

Unsupervised

Supervised

Unsupervised

THE FUTURE OF BOTS

• Your speech will be your operating system

• The line between online and offline will blur

• We will rely less on traditional search engines