Transit Visa and a Chatbot Story
While heading to the check-in counter at the Bangalore airport, excited to show the world what we have built Botmage, our chatbot platform, discussing which of its features to showcase, not being able to travel was the last thing on our minds. We hand over our passports and the ticket to the gentleman at the counter and continue our conversation as we wait. He flips through the passports and calls a couple of his colleagues over. They have a short discussion and declare — “Only one of you can travel today”.
Apparently, two of us lack a transit visa for the Schengen countries. My friend, who is a frequent traveller, starts to debate with the airline folks. A few minutes go by and we are mostly sure at this point that we cannot travel today. My other friend turns to me and says “We should build a chatbot for this!”
We were heading to Israel via Frankfurt to attend the Chatbot Summit 2018 to showcase — Botmage the chatbot platform that we’d built over the last couple of months. After building multiple chatbots for customers and as side projects, we had identified problems in trying to shoehorn the same development processes adopted for mobile and web apps to chatbots. Though there are technological limitations and we are far from building chatbots that can talk like humans, more than the technology or the tools, the development process is to blame for the majority of bot fails. Unlike the mobile app where you decide what goes on in each screen and menu, chatbots are a like a blank slate for users. They explain what they want in their own terms.
But even for chatbots, I have sat through walkthroughs of complex conversation flows that take months to develop and completely break down when the first user tries to use the bot. Botmage is our attempt to come up with a better development model for chatbots with the tools to support it. We were eager to showcase our approach to potential customers at the Chatbot Summit, see if it captures their interest and get some valuable feedback. (And of course, we wanted to meet our competition!)
We were all dressed up and had nowhere to go. All of us had travelled through the Schengen countries in the past and no one had ever demanded the transit visa. So we were really taken aback by this sudden turn of events. Apparently, if you have a valid US visa, you don’t need a transit visa in Schengen. As two of us had expired US visas, the transit visa was mandatory. We had been busy building our startup that researching on travel regulations had taken a back seat.
We finally managed to book an alternate itinerary for the next day through Amsterdam where you don’t need to have a transit visa if the layover is less than 6 hours. But we will miss Day 1 of the chatbot summit. We can do nothing about that. Like true technologists, we got thinking about how to prevent this from happening in the future. So, for the several future business trips that we will make for our very successful company, we decided to build a chatbot that will provide answers to questions on transit visa requirements.
It is built on our rapid bot building framework — Mandrake. For the data, it uses a Google Spreadsheet as the datasource, Google Dialogflow as the NLP engine (Mandrake supports multiple NLP engines, we are using Dialogflow here as it is free!). In sticking true to our methodology, we have built a bare bones bot to see how users interact with it and will continue to improve on it based on actual bot usage until it is perfect. You can try it out here:
Telegram: http://telegram.me/visa_assistant_bot
NOTE: We were not planning on putting our platform out there like this until a couple of hours ago. The cheap droplet on digitalocean might fall over, we may run into quota limits on google docs API and a million other things could go wrong. It is as if we are sending an infant to war. But then, as they say, when life gives you lemons, you run a lemonade stand :).
