The lifecycle of a chatbot

Sohan Maheshwar• Leads Developer Relations at Gupshup

• @soganmageshwar

• Likes comic books and frisbees

“The difficulty in building a chatbot is less a technical one and more an issue of user experience. The most successful bots will be the ones that users want to come back to regularly and that provide consistent value.”

- Matt Hartman, Director of Seed Investments at Betaworks

• Software, websites and apps have a dev. lifecycle

• Bot functionality is only going to get more complex

• Formal framework around the bot lifecycle

Requirement

• Gather market requirements

• Create user stories with conversation in mind

Spec

• Identify the features and functionality of the bot

• Choose your messaging platform(s)

• NLP usage

Script• The conversation is the interface

• Getting input from the user

• Variables in input

• Slot Filling

• Hand-crafting output

• Character

• Friendly

• Guide the user

• Script writers

Architect

• Engineering design for the bot

• Data persistence - Personalisation & Context

• Cross platform APIs

Develop• Range of tools for bot

development

• Ready-to-publish templates

• Conversation editors

• Cloud-based IDEs

• Custom development

• Simplicity is control

Test

• Diversity in messaging apps

• Difference in rendering messages

• Bot testing tools

Deploy

• Deployed to a hosted environment.

• The hosted environment must be stable & needs its own monitoring and devops support

Publish

• Approval process for each messaging platform

• Approval time ranges from instant (Telegram) to a few days (Facebook)

• Submissions require bot assets (icons, videos)

Monitor

• Monitor using actual conversational scripts.

• The bot may be unresponsive to certain user conversations.

Promote

• Bot Store Optimisation

• Cross-platform bot stores

• Third party referrals

Analyze

• Messages/session

• Retention

• Location, gender demographics

• Sentiment analysis

Requirement

• Infer new requirements from analytics

• Create new user stories

Questions?

© Copyright Gupshup 2016

Gupshup has been a leader in messaging and bots for many years

19

Cloud APIs for SMS • Leading cloud

messaging platform handling 3-4 billion messages per month. Launched 2010.

Teamchat messaging app • Pioneered structured

messages in chat. Built and deployed hundreds of bots. Launched 2014.

Bot Platform • Leverages prior

experience and expertise. Since f8, 2500 bots created, paying customers. Launched 2016.

Gupshup has been enabling advanced messaging-based services (now called bots) globally since 2010.

Happy Bot Building!