I am working on a chatbot, I have implemented it with Dialogflow (Dialogflow ES). I found that Dialogflow has the following Pros
Easy to use
Good at Intent classification
Good at extracting Entities (prebuilt/custom)
Conversations can be chained to a certain extent using input/output contexts and lifespan
But in my use case, there are certain situations where human level judgment is required and it cannot be done using Dialogflow. Can we add our custom logic to process certain user requests in Dialogflow or any other chatbot framework which provide more flexibility?
You're a bit vague what you mean by "custom logic", but this sounds like fulfillment is what you're looking for.
With this, you can enable Intents so they send JSON to code that you run (either by a webhook you run or via some deployed through an inline editor which manages the deployment for you). Your code can apply your business logic to determine what the response might be, including what replies to send, what Output Contexts are set, and any parameters that are in those Contexts.
I am trying to understand the different model in building a bot using dialogflow and came across this 2 methods.
Fulfillment model (with webhook enabled) documentation here
API Interactions documentation here
I understand that both of this models have their own pros and cons, and I understand how they both work. Most online examples are showing the fulfillment method (I guess that's more common?)
However, I would still like to ask what reason will it be to choose one or the other? If anyone had used either model before, what limitations are there?
p/s: I've look through quite a number of tutorials, and read through the dialogflow documentation.
the integration by fulfillment is indeed the default approach because you use DialogFlow to design your conversation flow and (big bonus) manage the integration with the various channels (ie Telegram, Facebook).
It is the easiest way to design a fully fledge conversation, you only need to worry about the post hooks that are sent to your backend to either save the data or alter the conversation (add contexts or trigger events).
Important remark: all user traffic (who says what) goes via Dialogflow cloud
The API interaction becomes a good option when you have already an existing frontend (say an existing application or web sites) and you want to plug in DialogFlow NLP capabilities.
I have done something like that to create a FAQ chatbot that called DialogFlow to identify which intent would match a certain phrase while the BOT was deployed in MS Teams.
The architecture would indeed look like the one in the documentation: MS Team ecosystem is the "End-User" part, then my Java app ("Your System") would use the API to call DialogFlow.
Important remark: only given statements (the ones you send) go to Dialogflow cloud
in my company, we are developing a bot with DialogFlow and find this platform quite convenient. However, we are experiencing a difficulty since every time that we have to move a version of the agent to the production environment through a restore of the development agent, we lose the training of the bot in production.
I would like to know if there is an equivalent way to move an agent to production environment without losing former training.
Thanks in advance,
Ricardo.
We synchronize the intents of our DialogFlow chatbot from our software using API.
Does an intent update automatically start chatbot training on Dialogflow?
if not, is there a way to start it using Dialogflow'api ?
Training will start automatically after agent alterations. You can instigate training manually via Dialogflow's v2 API which is documented here: https://dialogflow.com/docs/reference/api-v2/rest/v2beta1/projects.agent/train
I want to build a chatbot for a customer service application. I tried SaaS services like Wit.Ai, Motion.Ai, Api.Ai, LUIS.ai etc. These cognitive services find the "intent" and "entities" when trained with the typical interactions model.
I need to build chatbot for on-premise solution, without using any of these SaaS services.
e.g Typical conversation would be as following -
Can you book me a ticket?
Is my ticket booked?
What is the status of my booking BK02?
I want to cancel the booking BK02.
Book the tickets
StandFord NLP toolkit looks promising but there are licensing constraints. Hence I started experimenting with the OpenNLP. I assume, there are two OpenNLP tasks involved -
Use 'Document Categorizer' to find out the intent
Use 'Named Entity Recognition' to find out entities
Once the context is identified, I will call my application APIS to build the response.
Is it a right approach?
How good OpenNLP is in parsing the text?
Can I use Facebook FASTTEXT library for Intent identification?
Is there any other open source library which can be helpful in building the BOT?
Will "SyntaxNet" be useful for my adventure?
I prefer to do this in Java. BUT open to node or python solution too.
PS - I am new to NLP.
Have a look at this. It says it is an Open-source language understanding for bots and a drop-in replacement for popular NLP tools like wit.ai, api.ai or LUIS
https://rasa.ai/
Have a look at my other answer for a plan of attack when using Luis.ai:
Creating an API for LUIS.AI or using .JSON files in order to train the bot for non-technical users
In short use Luis.ai and setup some intents, start with one or two and train it based on your domain. I am using asp.net to call the Cognitive Service API as outlined above. Then customize the response via some JQuery...you could search a list of your rules in a javascript array when each intent or action is raised by the response from Luis.
If your Bot is english based, then I would use OpenNLP's sentence parser to dump the customer input into a database (I do this today). I then use the OpenNLP tokenizer and push the keywords (less the stop words) and Parts of Speech into a database table for keyword analysis. I have a custom Sentiment model built for OpenNLP that will tag each sentence with a Pos, Neg, Neutral sentiment...You can then use this to identify negative customer service feedback. To build your own Sentiment model have a look at SentiWord.net and download their domain agnostic data file to build and train an OpenNLP model or have a look at this Node version...
https://www.npmjs.com/package/sentiword
Hope that helps.
I'd definitely recommend Rasa, it's great for your use case, working on-premise easily, handling intents and entities for you and on top of that it has a friendly community too.
Check out my repo for an example of how to build a chatbot with Rasa that interacts with a simple database: https://github.com/nmstoker/lockebot
I tried RASA, But one glitch I found there was the inability of Rasa to answer unmatched/untrained user texts.
Now, I'm using ChatterBot and I'm totally in love with it.
Use "ChatterBot", and host it locally using - 'flask-chatterbot-master"
Links:
ChatterBot Installation: https://chatterbot.readthedocs.io/en/stable/setup.html
Host Locally using - flask-chatterbot-master: https://github.com/chamkank/flask-chatterbot
Cheers,
Ratnakar
With the help of the RASA and Botkit framework we can build the onpremise chatbot and the NLP engine for any channel. Please follow this link for End to End steps on building the same. An awsome blog that helped me to create a one for my office
https://creospiders.blogspot.com/2018/03/complete-on-premise-and-fully.html
First of all any chatbot is going to be the program that runs along with the NLP, Its the NLP that brings the knowledge to the chatbot. NLP lies on the hands of the Machine learning techniques.
There are few reasons why the on premise chatbots are less.
We need to build the infrastructure
We need to train the model often
But using the cloud based NLP may not provide the data privacy and security and also the flexibility of including my business logic is very less.
All together going to the on premise or on cloud is based on the needs and the use case of the requirements.
How ever please refer this link for end to end knowledge on building the chatbot on premise with very few steps and easily and fully customisable.
Complete On-Premise and Fully Customisable Chat Bot - Part 1 - Overview
Complete On-Premise and Fully Customisable Chat Bot - Part 2 - Agent Building Using Botkit
Complete On-Premise and Fully Customisable Chat Bot - Part 3 - Communicating to the Agent that has been built
Complete On-Premise and Fully Customisable Chat Bot - Part 4 - Integrating the Natural Language Processor NLP
Disclaimer: I am the author of this package.
Abodit NLP (https://nlp.abodit.com) can do what you want but it's .NET only at present.
In particular you can easily connect it to databases and can provide custom Tokens that are queries against a database. It's all strongly-typed and adding new rules is as easy as adding a method in C#.
It's also particularly adept at turning date time expressions into queries. For example "next month on a Thursday after 4pm" becomes ((((DatePart(year,[DATEFIELD])=2019) AND (DatePart(month,[DATEFIELD])=7)) AND (DatePart(dw,[DATEFIELD])=4)) AND DatePart(hour,[DATEFIELD])>=16)