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by tonylucas 3801 days ago
A great point regarding pragmatics. Personality is also becoming a key issue to consider.

There is a whole pile of interesting posts around building conversational services/bots.

Some interesting ones:

Sam Lessin: https://t.co/0ZFlBGPqpg Chris Messina: https://medium.com/@chrismessina/2016-will-be-the-year-of-co...

Matt Galligan: https://medium.com/@mg/the-graphical-user-interface-will-soo...

Clement Vouillon: https://medium.com/point-nine-news/software-bots-c56aeedcfec...

Ryan Block: https://medium.com/@ryan/bots-messaging-and-the-interface-vi...

I've also written a bunch of articles on how we tackle some of these problems at Converse AI here:

http://blog.converse.ai/introduction/an-introduction-to-conv...

1 comments

thanks a lot for your links!

I maintain a sort of microblog just about these topics: http://www.twitter.com/solyarisoftware

Me too I just discovered Chris Messina's definition of "conversational commerce", definition that I like.

About "personality":

Maybe some years ago we have called this just "user profiling".

In facts approach I suggested (modeling dialogs as a composition of state machines: http://www.github.com/solyaris/dialogs) is just a workflow framework indipendent by the personality/profiling implemenentation. - On one side personality/profiling could be delegated to to some "inerithed class" (of what I defined as "elemental" dialogs). - on the other side I'd delegate in the "interpret" method.

Let's consider the usual ecommerce workflow. This could be splitted in 2/3 successive dialogs:

1. compiling a shopping cart - dialog

2. setting the delivery address - dialog

3. setting the delivery time - dialog

So, by example, in the delivery address dialog, the chat bot (or "conversational agent") know the buyer person interacting (because he stored somewhere the buyer address in a previous "profiling" dialog ), so the chatbot could simply propose to use the stored address or submitting a new one.

Just to say, that, for business workflow, maybe the "personality" maybe is just a smart profiling. isn't it ?

giorgio