Contextual Reactive Pattern on Chatbot building Platforms

Abstract

Building a chatbot with an iterative development process poses certain challenges for the chatbot developer. The developer is expected to produce a deployable version of the chatbot at the end of a short development cycle. Every iteration should incrementally increase the capability of the chatbot and implement a subset of overall user stories based upon a priority list, similar to any other project developed using iterative development. In this regard, commercial chatbot-building platforms offer multiple advantages to the chatbot developer, provided that the developer can map these user stories in a particular form. To do so, for every query the chatbot is expected to answer, the developer must evaluate the intention of the user. Based on the intention, the query must be processed differently, which may involve execution of some business logic. In addition, the processing of the query may require specific data items which the user must supply as part of the conversation with the chatbot. Thus, the chatbot is defined by supplying a "context" that it may encounter, and the "reaction" that must take place when the context is observed. In this work, we discuss the effects of using a platform to build a chatbot and discuss the Contextual Reactive pattern used for chatbot definition.