David Collier's Presentation from WeChat Development Meetup

1. Creating
for fun and profit
David ‘DC’ Collier
dc@rikai.co
github.com/dcsan
Chatbots

2. RIKAI Labs - ChatBots over WeChat
David ‘DC’ Collier
4 startups, 2 exits (US, Japan)
20 years experience in games industry
Produced Games for EA, Disney,
BandaiNamco, Sony + more. Frequent
hackathon winner!
Edaan Getzel
English teaching experience in China + Korea.
Published Author. Real-estate Entrepreneur.
Company
Our AI ChatBot platform connects users
with our AI supported teachers.
The AI learns from the teachers response
and takes over the repetitive Q&A.
Our scripting engine allows us to design a
structure for the content to keep things
exciting and moving along. Chatbots
provide a mix of audio, text and images to
help people learn, all without leaving
WeChat.
Products Platform
Micro英语 (MicroEnglish)
The first app for learning english right
inside of WeChat! It allows users to chat to
our AI supported teachers and practice
conversational english anytime and
anywhere!

3. Talk Outline
• What’s a Chatbot? Examples
• Bot cookbook - how to bake a ‘bot
• structure, visuals, language design
• One more example
• Bot brainstorming session!

4. Looking for ‘bot ideas?
Slack
slack.com/apps
Telegram
storebot.me
KIK
bots.kik.com

5. Some RIKAI Labs ‘bots
Lawyer Bot - legal advice and contracts
Finbot - your personal financial adviser
FreeCodeCamp - learn to code with your bot teacher!
JoBot - Job interviews over WeChat
Micro English - learn english in WeChat!

6. Structural
● gamification
● bot - user context and
relationship
● timing
● wide vs.deep
● personality and backstory

7. Chat + Gamification
Karma points awarded by a bot in the chat
A bot is watching the chat and giving points to
users (ranking) based on thanks @user
Also acts as a clue for data-mining the chats.
Quest / Task list
Given objectives within a
chat, you can come back to
the bot

8. Bot <> User relationship
User <> Bot
Team bots
Background bots
User > Bot > User
NPC characters

9. Visual
● typography
● embedded content
● interactive widgets

10. Using markdown, ASCII art and emoji to create
engaging TEXT content
Menus which are nicely formatted with UTF
characters
Stickers and other inline animations
Bot typography
Stickers!

11. Interactive Chat Widgets
Buttons Sliders Inline games

12. Embedded Content
WeChat - has its own whole CMS for news
articles + a browser
Slack - markdown, custom cards
Gitter - embedly for twitter, youtube etc
FB Messenger - content cards
KIK - built in browser

13. Conversational

14. 1st gen bots are mostly passing parameters:
@bot remind me to do <task> at <time>
Next gen bots should be able to have a more
natural conversation. But how?
Moving beyond “slot filling” chats

15. Approaches to Natural Conversation
1) Machine learning / big data
eg CleverBot has a huge amount of random chat data, but doesn’t understand it.
You really need a two-sided bot for this to work. example: customer support with
agents responding to customers
2) Understanding / AI
Parsers, NLP and extracting and acting on the meaning. Logic variables, decisions.
3) Human supervision
human supervision of incoming data.
4) Blended approach
Mixing the above to get the best of all worlds

16. NLP and NLG
Natural Language Processing
works well for reducing down many
possible inputs
Certainly! When would
you like to go?
When do you want to go?
Natural Language Generation
to produce a variety of interesting
replies
Hi! I’d like to buy a ticket
Do you sell tickets to ...
When is the next show?
Are there any tickets left?
We sure do! How many
would you like?
{
item: ticket
intent: buy
}

17. Humans are good at understanding the question
filtering and identifying and understand what the question is
Bots can be great at answering those questions
with examples, images, and content that can be re-used and optimized.
Admin UI
Key here is good Admin UI so humans can respond quickly.
Async vs Sync replies
It’s ok to say “I’ll get back to you” depending on the context. As long as you have
something else to fill in the gaps.
Supervised Bots - “Artificial AI”

18. Chatbot Learning Feedback Loop
User says
something
Teacher
responds
System
learns

19. Art and science
Chat scripts need to be something writers can use.
Bots can require a lot of code/content, so the chat scripting language needs to be
readable. (eg Chatscript will reduce Wordnet syntax to ~emolike )
Admin / Visual UIs over code editors
The “admin UI” can also be the scripting environment - simply by replying to
customers you are “training” the bot.
Dialog editors, spreadsheets and interactive fiction authoring ala Twinery.org
Chat app development tools

20. Personality

21. 1. What is the bot’s objective?
2. What type of information are you getting from the user?
3. I don’t like chatting with boring people,
… so why would anyone want to chat with a boring bot?
Your bot should be interesting!

22. The Donald
the most spectacular bot
persona in the world

23. Ecosystemical!

24. EcoSystem / Opportunity
App Store / Google Play Apps
websitesGoogle
Slack Directory Chat apps
WeChat / FB Messenger /
LINE / Telegram
Apps
Web
B2B Chat apps
B2C Chat apps Chat apps

25. Conversational experience
Two way - you want to get info from the users too
UI has a wide set of options to choose from that won’t suit a menu
Machine learning loop is available
Suitable for community
Can play an assistant role to a human
When to use a Chatbot?!

26. RIKAI Labs - We Build Bots!
Micro-Eng
Learn english
on WeChat
wechat: dc-magic
dc@rikai.co
RIKAI Labs also build
custom bots for other
companies. Get in
touch if you’d like to
discuss!