June 24: Chatbot

 Chatbots

 

Today in STEM Skill we made our own chatbot. A chatbot is a program that can help automate customer service questions. Although it cannot completely replace humans, it does make customer service jobs much more efficient. One person can manage many different customer calls at the same time. Unless it is a difficult issue to solve.

    First, we copied code for a basic Python chatbot. I made the bot recommend an instrument based on the user's favorite genre of music. The code was surprisingly simple. It used loops, if else, and else statements. Here's a picture of my final code:

 Then I used Chatfuel to make an interactive Facebook page to tell you what woodwind you should play. It worked like a flow chart and was very intuitive. First, I asked what octave the user wanted to play in and filtered it down to one instrument from there. Here's a picture of my flow chart:

Flow is filtering down user inputs to get to one solid answer. It is like a flow chart of user options. One pitfall of a Chatbot is that it cannot solve unique or complex problems. Even making a flow chart that is not linear in shape is much more difficult. It is also hard to include all the options users might respond with.