Building bots with no code at Silicon Valley Code Campe

1. © 2015 IBM Corporation
Stefania Kaczmarczyk
Developer Advocate
No Code Bot Building with
Watson Conversation

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“An Internet bot, also known as web robot, WWW robot
or simply bot, is a software application that runs
automated tasks (scripts) over the Internet. Typically,
bots perform tasks that are both simple and
structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than
would be possible for a human alone.” - Wikipedia
Bots
“A chatterbot (also known as a talkbot, chatbot, Bot,
chatterbox, Artificial Conversational Entity) is a
computer program which conducts a conversation
via auditory or textual methods. Some chatterbots
use sophisticated natural language processing
systems, but many simpler systems scan for
keywords within the input, then pull a reply with the
most matching keywords, or the most similar wording
pattern, from a database.” - Wikipedia
Chatbots

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Lyft it from Facebook

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An AI teaching assistant for an
artificial intelligence class at
Georgia Tech
“Jill Watson”

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But first!
Get a service
deployed.
Hint: Go to bluemix.net

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Now start bashing out
some intents.

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Just kidding. No code.

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You Know Nothing of
Language

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Feedback and
Repetition
– Don’t ask the speaker to
repeat themselves too often
– Confirm details: “Your order
was made on September 1,
2016 right?”
– Get to the point and take the
short route when appropriate
– Remember details about them

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Intents
– What’s the weather?
– I need new glasses
– Where is the closest pizza
place?
What a user wants to do even
if they don’t know that they
want to do it. ere

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Entities
– Pizza toppings
– Car makes
– Articles of clothing
Nouns and their synonyms.
Adding variation that the bot
can narrow down to a specific
choice and store.

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Dialog – conversation_start
– Anything else

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Testing the Bot

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Brainstorm a Bot – Scope – avoid scope creep
– Start a conversation with
someone else and see how
they ask questions
– Pick an industry or a tough
task like calling tech support
– Imagine a life without other
humans

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Getting
Advanced:
Context Objects
– Store user selected variables
– Store details about the user
– Feed information to your app
– Turn the user into their own
SQL search builder

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Recall – Directly recall or store the
user’s text: <? Input.text ?>
– Echo or store an entity:
@coffee
– Recall a context variable: <?
$username ?>

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Loop Back – Reroute the user to another
conversation path
– Avoid repeating logic
– Reprompt

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Next Steps – Connect the conversation
service to an app
– Store responses in a
database and look for edge
cases
– Connect it to an actual robot
For a basic chat dialog with
Node.js fork the code at:
http://bit.ly/2djEkfa

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Credentials!