chat apps v02
TRANSCRIPT
RIKAI Labs - ChatBots over WeChat
David ‘DC’ Collier4 startups, 2 exits (US, Japan)20 years experience in games industryProduced Games for EA, Disney, BandaiNamco, Sony + more. Frequent hackathon winner!
Edaan GetzelEnglish teaching experience in China + Korea. Published Author. Real-estate Entrepreneur.
Company
Our AI ChatBot platform connects users with our AI supported teachers. The AI learns from the teachers response and takes over the repetitive Q&A. Our scripting engine allows us to design a structure for the content to keep things exciting and moving along. Chatbots provide a mix of audio, text and images to help people learn, all without leaving WeChat.
Products Platform
Micro英语 (MicroEnglish) The first app for learning english right inside of WeChat! It allows users to chat to our AI supported teachers and practice conversational english anytime and anywhere!
Talk Outline
• What’s a Chatbot? Examples • Bot cookbook - how to bake a ‘bot
• structure, visuals, language design • One more example • Bot brainstorming session!
Looking for ‘bot ideas?
Slack slack.com/apps
Telegram storebot.me KIK
bots.kik.com
Some RIKAI Labs ‘bots
Lawyer Bot - legal advice and contracts Finbot - your personal financial adviser FreeCodeCamp - learn to code with your bot teacher! JoBot - Job interviews over WeChat Micro English - learn english in WeChat!
Structural● gamification ● bot - user context and
relationship ● timing ● wide vs.deep ● personality and backstory
Chat + Gamification
Karma points awarded by a bot in the chatA bot is watching the chat and giving points to users (ranking) based on thanks @userAlso acts as a clue for data-mining the chats.
Quest / Task listGiven objectives within a chat, you can come back to the bot
Bot <> User relationship
User <> Bot
Team bots
Background bots
User > Bot > User
NPC characters
Visual ● typography ● embedded content ● interactive widgets
Using markdown, ASCII art and emoji to create engaging TEXT contentMenus which are nicely formatted with UTF charactersStickers and other inline animations
Bot typographyStickers!
Interactive Chat Widgets
Buttons Sliders Inline games
Embedded ContentWeChat - has its own whole CMS for news articles + a browserSlack - markdown, custom cardsGitter - embedly for twitter, youtube etcFB Messenger - content cardsKIK - built in browser
Conversational
1st gen bots are mostly passing parameters:
@bot remind me to do <task> at <time>
Next gen bots should be able to have a more natural conversation. But how?
Moving beyond “slot filling” chats
Approaches to Natural Conversation1) Machine learning / big dataeg CleverBot has a huge amount of random chat data, but doesn’t understand it.You really need a two-sided bot for this to work. example: customer support with agents responding to customers
2) Understanding / AIParsers, NLP and extracting and acting on the meaning. Logic variables, decisions.
3) Human supervisionhuman supervision of incoming data.
4) Blended approachMixing the above to get the best of all worlds
NLP and NLG
Natural Language Processing works well for reducing down many possible inputs
Certainly! When would you like to go?
When do you want to go?
Natural Language Generation to produce a variety of interesting replies
Hi! I’d like to buy a ticket
Do you sell tickets to ...
When is the next show?
Are there any tickets left?
We sure do! How many would you like?
{ item: ticket intent: buy}
Humans are good at understanding the questionfiltering and identifying and understand what the question isBots can be great at answering those questions with examples, images, and content that can be re-used and optimized.
Admin UIKey here is good Admin UI so humans can respond quickly.
Async vs Sync repliesIt’s ok to say “I’ll get back to you” depending on the context. As long as you have something else to fill in the gaps.
Supervised Bots - “Artificial AI”
Chatbot Learning Feedback Loop
User says something
Teacher responds
System learns
Art and scienceChat scripts need to be something writers can use.Bots can require a lot of code/content, so the chat scripting language needs to be readable. (eg Chatscript will reduce Wordnet syntax to ~emolike )
Admin / Visual UIs over code editorsThe “admin UI” can also be the scripting environment - simply by replying to customers you are “training” the bot.Dialog editors, spreadsheets and interactive fiction authoring ala Twinery.org
Chat app development tools
Personality
1. What is the bot’s objective? 2. What type of information are you getting from the user? 3. I don’t like chatting with boring people, … so why would anyone want to chat with a boring bot?
Your bot should be interesting!
The Donald
the most spectacular bot persona in the world
Ecosystemical!
EcoSystem / Opportunity
App Store / Google Play Apps
websitesGoogle
Slack Directory Chat apps
WeChat / FB Messenger / LINE / Telegram
Apps
Web
B2B Chat apps
B2C Chat apps Chat apps
Conversational experience Two way - you want to get info from the users too UI has a wide set of options to choose from that won’t suit a menu Machine learning loop is available Suitable for community Can play an assistant role to a human
When to use a Chatbot?!
RIKAI Labs - We Build Bots!
Micro-Eng
Learn english on WeChat
wechat: dc-magic [email protected]
RIKAI Labs also build custom bots for other companies. Get in touch if you’d like to discuss!