It's a bot!

For a little over a year, I have been diving further and further into the world of chatbots. It all began with Microsoft's QnA Maker Preview. QnA Maker Preview allowed for the very fast creation of a simple QnA chatbot, utilizing existing FAQ sites or documents. I presented on Microsoft QnA Maker last spring at CONNECT in Niagara Falls, touching on a user interface that allowed for greater customization and more helpful responses.

In that presentation, I also highlighted some features that were missing from QnA Maker that I was hoping to address. A couple of points I made were context switching and speech to text/text to speech. Very shortly after that presentation, Microsoft was making some significant changes to QnA Maker (now that it was coming out of Preview), making it more difficult to get up and running, and making it virtually impossible to do so for free. I had already started looking at other chatbot "engines", and discovered Dialogflow. Dialogflow solved several of the issues related to QnA Maker.

Though Dialogflow was more challenging to configure than QnA Maker Preview, it was far simpler to configure than the upcoming QnA Maker (Production). It also has a completely free tier that is very generous. Finally, Dialogflow already implements context aware conversations that can branch depending on a user's response and the speech to text/text to speech capability.

Dialogflow has several "integrations", including a web demo. Their web demo is actually pretty good, but has one major flaw; it does not recognize URLs and make them active links. Over the last several months I have been updating the user interface I was using for QnA Maker to work with Dialogflow and have implemented active links, along with user-adjustable text size and even a QR code feature for links. It has been both a frustrating and rewarding experience relearning HTML and Javascript.

This week, our team in the Faculty of Ed put an auto-responder on our help email directing people to our new chatbot coworker. I wonder if chatbots live with the anxiety of a probationary period on a new job...