Patrick the packet, a chatbot to enhance your experience with package deliveries
Chat and organize the delivery directly with your package
During our Master degree, we were given the task to enhance customer service themed chatbots and to research on what could be some new innovative features.
After some initial research we stepped on package tracking which has a lot of potential in our eyes.
There are not a lot of chatbot solutions to manage the delivery of your package. The only one that we found were simple assistants that redirected to the webpage when ask for specific topics.
It mostly feels unfinished and unnecessary for customer that have experience with more complete chatbots.
What can we do better?
Our idea started with feature ideas that can replace the customer portal and make it unnecessary to use it altogether.
We are looking at basic features like:
- Package location
- Estimated arrival
- Deposit options
Using the chatbot should enable customers to act in a more natural way and with less burdens. Continuing on this path, we explored ideas to make the interaction more memorable and fun.
That is were the final concept of Patrick emerged. We want customer to experience a new way of package tracking by actually asking their package themselve!
Our concept personifies the deliverable and tries to make it as easy as chatting with a friend to manage your packages.
What does it looks like?
The following screenshots explain the main features that are implemented.
Asking and saving the package id
Patrick understands the requirement of the package id to perform most of the supported tasks.
Once received and saved, Patrick can use it to request information about himself.
Asking about the package location
Patrick will request information with the package id about it’s current location and will share it with the customer with a map pointer.
Defining deposit options
Patrick understands when a customer defines a specific deposit instructions and saves it in the system.
It will be added as information when asked for the arrival estimation as well.
How does it work?
Patrick is for the moment a chatbot only accessible on Telegram. The following diagram shows an overview on the internal architecture of our chatbot:
Patrick is implemented in Python and uses the python-telegram-bot wrapper to communicate with Telegram. A simple function that echoes the same message back to the user will look like the following
def start(update, context):
[...]def text(update, context):
update.message.reply_text(update.message.text)def main():
TOKEN = "TELEGRAM TOKEN HERE"
updater = Updater(TOKEN)
updater.dispatcher.add_handler(MessageHandler(Filters.text, text))
updater.start_polling()
updater.idle()
Rasa NLU offers a REST API to parse messages which needs to be activate on the server launch:
$ rasa run --enable-apiRasa NLU includes an OpenApi file on their website which can be used to generate the python client code with OpenAPI Generator.
A trained Rasa NLU server can then be requested from the Python implementation:
import openapi_client
from openapi_client import InlineObject1
from openapi_client.rest import ApiException
configuration = openapi_client.Configuration()
def parse_message(message):
with openapi_client.ApiClient(configuration):
api_instance = openapi_client.ModelApi()
try:
api_response = api_instance.parse_model_message(InlineObject1(text=message))
return api_response
except ApiException as e:
print(f'Could not connect to Rasa')
Conclusion
We presented our work on chatbots during our Master degree in multiple steps going from necessity exploration to concept ideas and finishing with explanation on the implementation.
The chatbot prototype was developped by Michel Sahli and Kevin Pantillon.
Thanks for reading and discover more interesting stories of Empathic Labs
