Our experimental initiative to prototype a bot-ready information solution using Google’s Dialogflow

This post is part of a series. For more information and links to other posts in the series, see the “Building bot-ready knowledge bases” home page.

Our transition to programmatic solutions

In our “bot-ready” projects and series of posts about them, we’ve started transitioning our focus from improving and “botifying” our content to experimenting with programmatic solutions and application integration. Dick’s most recent post on web hooks, #9 in the series, is an example of that change in emphasis.

However, before we moved away from GROCERYbot and its knowledge base, we wanted to do the following:

Add training phrases to the DITA/XML grocery shopping files
Review “grocery shopping” as a suitable model for more advanced projects

Adding training phrases to the DITA/XML grocery shopping files

The last additions we made to our grocery shopping files were sample user queries. Shown in the following image, these serve both as a checklist of the article content (“Does the article answer the most likely questions users might have about the topic?”) as well as training phrases for the bot.

We labeled the questions as “faqs” (“frequently asked questions”).

Dialogflow has the capability of automatically converting these FAQs into intents (which, in GROCERYbot, we created laboriously by hand), and we intend to experiment with this capability in the near future.

Training phrases in a grocery shopping input file

Reviewing “grocery shopping” as a suitable model for more advanced projects

The following image shows the metadata in the final version of “Produce: Overview,” as viewed in the published HTML file.

XHTML output file for "Produce: Overview", accessed with "view source" — XHTML output file for “Produce: Overview”, accessed with “view source”

These items are not directly available to either a person or a bot viewing only the published content, but they can easily be accessed programmatically. Some of the more useful metadata elements in a bot environment are the following:

Title and abstract/description

The information contained in these elements could be helpful to users as “teaser text” included in a set of bot-suggested articles to help users make an educated guess about the articles’ potential usefulness.

Items labeled as “DC.subject” and “keywords” (typical keyword tags associated with content to identify important topics)

Items with a DC prefix are part of the Dublin Core Schema, a “recognized” set of vocabulary terms that can be used to describe digital resources.

Content creator and contributor
Dates when the article was created, updated, and is due to expire
Training phrases mentioned above and labeled as “faq”
Language the article is written in

Having this information assembled as a kind of “bot training kit” is particularly useful because it allows the creators, editors, and owners of the content (the “content team”) to focus the bot’s attention on the information they consider to be most important to them and their users. A bot could not “intuit” all of this information from the KB article content alone, and no bot could create an abstract or short description to match the quality of one created by the article’s author.

In addition, it allows the content team greater control over how the information is displayed to the user. For example, the bot could be directed to show only the short description text as a “teaser,” rather than allowing the bot to select or create its own text for that purpose.

If appropriate, depending on various training model and various NLP (natural language processing) factors, the article text could also be added to the kit.

So, yes, we believe our grocery shopping project can serve as a model for us to build on, and we are moving on to more interesting and potentially useful projects.

What’s next?

Our most recent Dialogflow experiments involve integration with apps like Telegram and Slack, and the “bot training kit” described above is playing a key role.

Dick has written a Python script to pull key metadata out of the grocery shopping HTML output files and populate a CSV file, which he is using as a knowledge base connector to a Dialogflow-based, follow-on version of GROCERYbot. In addition, he integrated “GROCERYbot2” with the Telegram instant messaging app, so users can take advantage of Telegram’s advanced text and voice platform to access grocery shopping information.

We will publish more about our amazing results in the next post.