Phases of Chatbot Engineering
Published in
2 min readNov 6, 2019
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Whether you build your own chatbot or hire a third-party to build it for you, you should be aware of the development process involved.
Chatbots are built in these steps:
- Design
- Build
- Test
- Maintain
Design
The first step in making a chatbot is to design it. You need to know who it’s for, what it will do for them, how it will do it, and how you will evaluate success.
Users
Who is the customer or user of the bot? Define one or more user personas and optionally identify which specific users belong to which personas. What do they want? Do you have a feedback mechanism?
Use Cases
Does the bot fall into one of the following common use-cases:
- Entertainment
- Commerce
- News
- Utility
- Question answering
- Customer service
Positioning
Determine the solution’s:
- Purpose: solution’s job description
- Viewpoint: is the solution like an employee, an independent entity, an advocate or friend of the customer?
- Level of proactivity: take action independently or wait to respond to user request
Personalization and User Experience
Consider dimension to personalize on:
- The length of the user’s learning curve in understanding the bot
- User needs: what motivates them to use the bot? Purpose(s) for using the CUI
- Level of proactivity
- Timing: when does the user like to interact with the bot?
- User context: where will a user be when interacting, on what devices, what dates and seasons, what state of mind?
- Empathy: Does the user need empathy from the bot?
- Formality:
- Verbosity
- Entertainment: if the user is bored
- Reassurance:
- Values: Understand and support the user’s values and emotions
- Dialog repetition: the bot should attune to, and predict, next steps in multiple conversations with the same person. The bot can skip steps if they are predictable for that individual.
Build
Frameworks
