Quick Starting My Chatbot

They haven’t “crossed the chasm” yet but it was past due to awaken my very own Frankenstein’s Monster of a chatbot. With tons of free and approachable tools available there’s no reason not to.

Chatbots have a ton of potential. There seems to be a growing stigma in some emerging tech circles that they’re a tired old hat by now or just a cute toy to play with. But that’s not dissuading me.

Chatting is a far more natural way for us humans to interact with a soulless digital system. Much more so than clicking around a meticulously designed visual interface. Our traditional interaction methods are still rudimentary, they haven’t really changed since the dawn of the mouse.

Where was I to start? Luckily there’s a huge chatbot community on Medium. This article on Chatbots Magazine is a great resource for getting your feet wet.

Creating any old chatbot wouldn’t do. This wasn’t going to be some simple data in — data out, prompt-and-response affair. My creation needs sophistication, personality, layers and above all it needs to converse. To make this happen I needed a platform that can support Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning (ML) and custom code.

Wit.ai seemed to fit the bill. They were acquired by Facebook so it’s a good bet they have something worthwhile. Their website and bot building tools seemed friendly and approachable enough, not to mention a definite Facebook vibe.

So, I signed up. This was my first chatbot, I had no idea what I was doing. Following their 5 Minute Quickstart seemed like the best next step. I dove in.

After about thirty minutes of tinkering and following instructions I was ready to have my mind blown. I opened a trusty command prompt and asked my bot how the weather was…

Not sure it’s weather source is trustworthy. Either that or the Internet of Things has truly become u-butt-quitous. Puns totally intended.

You can’t hold a conversation with it yet but at least it’s awake. The quickstart was true to its word. I‘m naming it Barnard after Barnard’s Star, one of the most studied red dwarfs.

Barnard the chatbot is a launch pad. From here it can take any shape and learn to interact. Perhaps collaborating on guitar riffs. Or maybe providing status reports to the higher-ups. There are so many possibilities.

Teaching it “hello” seems like a good start.