The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its increasing influence in our day-to-day lives has been exciting to witness. We can now interact with chatbots that can help us with tasks ranging from simple customer service inquiries to more complicated financial transactions.
Today, I’m going to complete a design challenge and write a chatbot that is powered by the JavaScript library Coquette. Developing a realistic chatbot is no easy task, and fortunately, the Coquette library makes it easier for developers to do just that. Used by development teams around the world, the Coquette library contains an internal messaging system called "bouncy" which makes building dialogue trees easy. It also contains the code for a concise conversation model based on intent matching.
I’ll be using Java to develop the project, with a focus on understanding object-oriented design and design patterns. Java has many advantages when it comes to developing a chatbot, such as its wide availability, its scalability, and its ease of use. It also has a robust support system and a rich library of libraries.
To get started, I’m going to define a series of intents that the chatbot will recognize. This could include words and phrases that could potentially appear in the dialogue that will help the chatbot identify its purpose. For example, it could recognize the phrase "I need help" and provide helpful information relevant to the user. Nest, I’ll create a dialogue tree that will allow the chatbot to respond to queries within a given tree structure.
Once I have mapped out different intents and identified the conversation’s dialogue tree, I will begin to implement the logic. Here, I’ll be using Java to make sure the syntactic structure of the code is consistent with the intent matching I defined earlier. Then, I’ll be able to use the Coquette library to help me manage the conversation’s logic. If all goes as planned, then I’ll be able to create a simple chatbot that can interpret and respond to queries based on the conversation’s intent.
This project already has me feeling excited. Even though I’ll need to write a lot of code, I can’t wait to see the real-world applications that it could have. With the current state of technology, I’m sure it won’t be long before chatbots can handle more complicated tasks. For now, I'm looking forward to beginning this project and learning as much as I can along the way.