SMS Chatbots for MyWell — Part 1.5
Update: the sms chatbot now has a landing page! Check it out here:
You may have noticed the heading has changed, it used to be “Building a NLP system for MyWell”, but I thought the term “SMS-Bot” was more to the point, and sounded way cooler. Plus, I’ve wanted to build a useful robot, ever since playing with Lego Mindstorms as a kid. This is my chance!
Have a read of part 1 here.
So here’s a quick update.
1. Kevin
Kevin is on uni holidays soon, and he sounds more than happy to help out! If you recall from my last post, Kevin left us on quite the cliffhanger as we didn’t know how interested and available he would be.
Kevin is one of those genius kids who makes you super nervous about your career, to the point where you work really hard just to stay one step ahead. In the past, we built a quadcopter (read: I watched Kevin build us a quadcopter) and he flew it into a tree.
Enough about Kevin, part 2:
2. System Design
I’ve been thinking about the design of this system over the last couple days, and I’ve made the following decisions:
Amazon Lex
We will be testing out Amazon Lex for the MVP. I would really love to implement the NLP for this myself, but it simply makes sense to pay Amazon to do it in order to prove this concept. Hopefully it will help us set up some well defined interfaces between our system and Amazon Lex, that we can then implement ourselves down the line.
That said, I still need to do more research into Lex in order to see if it is the right fit for this project. It looks like it is still in preview.
Language Support
Something that we’ve been wanting to add to MyWell for a while is support for other languages, firstly Hindi, but also Gujarati and Rajasthani.
It of course makes sense to implement a our SMS-Bot in these languages as well! It’s a challenge to keep in mind as we don’t want to be making decisions to make this too difficult in the future. We’ll stick with English for the MVP however, and perhaps a little bit of pirate.
Apart from these considerations, we need to build a system that recieves SMS messages as HTTP requests from an SMS Gateway provider, and sends them to Lex to be understood. We also need to build a system that can understand which information is missing from a query, and ask the user for more information. I’ve got a more detailed system design on the project’s github, which you can find here.
As always, thanks for reading, and if you want to get in touch, check out our website at vesselstech.com, or shoot me a mail at lewis@vesselstech.com
