Show HN: BotEngine – Easy tool for creating chatbots | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: BotEngine – Easy tool for creating chatbots

botengine.ai

124 pointsajaskiewicz59 comments

I have lots of text about a particular topic (50K Articles crawled from internet about travel experiences). Now I want to create a chat bot whose chats/answers are from this given text. Basically I want to feed my text to this bot service and creates a chat bot for this given text. Is anyone aware of how do I do this.. Not sure If I made it clear..

Actually it's not possible to make it using only BotEngine. I'd suggest you to create a microservice which you'll use to suggest content from these articles. BotEngine could connect with this service using webhooks.

I saw a demo recently where someone used Microsoft Bot Framework for what you described. Can't find the video at the moment, but might be worth looking into. [https://dev.botframework.com/]

you need more than just this.

1) you need to get all your articles in some sort of search index. Sounds like you will want, at minimum, full text search on article content, plus maybe search of some extracted metadata (depending on if you can get something consistent easily).

2) a little API for serving up search results.

3) integration with something like this BotEngine thing for controlling the front-end/user interface to your data + search backend.

Had exactly the same problem - if you can get them into a question/answer format https://qnamaker.ai works for us.

Imho the most intuitive user interface for bot creation software: http://wstaw.org/m/2017/07/11/Screen_Shot_2017-07-11_at_16.2...

That UI looks much more usable than the chatbot itself. As a user I would probably prefer to traverse the tree and see multiple options at the same time than to pretend I'm having a chat.

Sounds like a normal FAQ list with nested items, I think bots will achieve better customer service ;)

A bit off-topic, but I want custom bots per person via facebook or mail for something like:

››You still owe me back book XY. Type "snooze" to be reminded again in 7 days. Or be reminded again tomorrow. Type "done" if you got this reminder despite having done it (same as "snooze", but I'll manually review if I should remove the reminder)‹‹

Nice idea! We'll think about it :)

Props for a fresh, clean design. The docs are fantastic, easy to read, and doesn't contain verbose technical bloat. Overall excellent design and UX execution.

Thanks a lot!

I second that. Who did your design? I'm looking for a great designer, can I get a referral for yours? isa at flutesystems.com

Actually our developers who created also the whole tool ;)

how does it different than other (seemingly similar) offerings? e.g. api.ai, wit.ai, chatfuel, manychat. i've used wit.ai, it's buggy (randomly missing stuff after you save them) and api.ai (so far ok).

The first thing - it's very intuitive and simple, second - BotEngine will be the only tool integrated with LiveChat and third - we'll focus on machine learning.

> BotEngine will be the only tool integrated with LiveChat

How come?

We're building the integration and it will be available soon.

https://www.livechatinc.com says there are over 20,000 businesses using LiveChat, so there's actually a market for chat bots someone creates. It's nice to build things for fun, but even better if someone uses it in real life.

Honest question: Are chatbots really used or is just a nice-thing to have? When I visit website and the chatbot pops up it really feels like it disrupts MY browsing, I immediately turn it off. I really wanted to if chatbots can translate into new sales.

A chatbot in customer service is a time saver. I know a lot of people working in customer service and they have to answer the same questions over and over and over again. The thing is that if a bot is not able to resolve an issue, the conversation is automatically transform to a human being.

I'm happy that I'm not the only one who closes tab when something uninvited pops up. At the same time I wouldn't agree it's a chatbot-related issue. It's rather poor UX design.

I'm realist and IMO chatbots are not ready for handling pre-sales or sophisticated support cases. However I see a huge potential in dealing with conversations that follow known scheme. Let it be cinema reservation or flight change - they look very similar in most cases. That's where chatbots might come in.

For example in my company (LiveChat) we're experimenting with handling app onboarding by chatbot. Results are very promising :-)

You guys desperately (I'd like to type that 37 times in a row for emphasis) need a serious, one-click to start, interactive product demonstration (without requiring my email first). I should be able to instantly step into serious business use examples catering to multiple industries (eg whatever industries you guys might choose to target first), so you can show me what it can actually do.

I clicked on product tour, entered a name, and then got this ridiculousness:

Me: Johnny Cash

Bot: That's interesting

Bot: Ready for an adventure?

Me: No

Bot: Oh no, why? It will be fun!

Bot: Are you sure? :(

Me: (pre-scripted) ok, I can try

Bot: Great, so let's try again.

Bot: Do you want to do something relaxing or should we go crazy?

---

That's where I quit. Unintentionally creepy bot is slightly creepy. Am I talking to a serious product bot, or is this get trashed and sleep on my couch party bot? Wild and crazy times ahead.

Potential customers should be able to dive right into a conversation with your bot tech. You should be extremely eager to show me what it can do in a live conversation and you should have stellar pre-built examples for that purpose all available from one click on the home page. My take away from my experience, is your bot tech can't do much so you're not immediately getting into showing off its capabilities (I don't know if that's the case or not, but if this were any other site, that would be my take away from it, and I'd never return).

Thanks a lot for your valuable feedback! This is the early beta version of our product and we really appreciate our users' opinion. We'll work on that product demonstration.

>BotEngine allows you to create a chatbot for any service.

except for the ones that are not implemented. would be interested to try this out once it has telegram support.

We'll have integrations with LiveChat and Slack very soon. I'm adding telegrams and post pigeons to our to-do.

You should probably add Discord, as well.

Is it free 100%? Or has it some premium paid features?

100% free

> For now it's free ;) https://www.producthunt.com/posts/botengine#comment-490613

Is anyone using Inform (or some other interactive fiction programming language) for bot programming? This project reminds me of some of the old tools for adventure games, so I’m wonder if anyone went to one of the interactive fiction tools.

OT but I really like the website - do you mind if I ask who created it?

While we're off topic, show the language some love: http://www.thesaurus.com/browse/super

Thanks! Actually our dev team created also a website

No pricing? imo you lose users /w pricing page

Off-topic: is /w short for without? I've never seen that before.

/w - with, /wo - without

isn't it w/ and wo/ ?

I read /w as short for /whisper

Isn't it w/ and w/o?

yeah actually

No pricing because it's free for now ;)

Then brag about that. I've spent ages in the past getting annoyed at hard to find pricing pages; even if I eventually discover it's free it's still an off-putting on-boarding process.

Exactly my point, if it's free then tell me

Said and done ;) -> https://www.botengine.ai/pricing/

Is there a way to just get the user response and forward it to a webhook ? (and of course send a reply received from the webservice)

Yup -> https://docs.botengine.ai/key-concepts/interactions?id=webho...

As a user, why would I want a chatbot instead of up-to-date documentation with a search engine that works?

Many users prefer LiveChat, rather than browsing the documentation or using the search engine. Additionally, documentation and search engine don't provide private information, e.g. the status of your order.

Really cool. Is it possible to publish the bot to a website as a JS widget?

We're currently working on that, it should be available this month

On page "product tour": https://botengine.ai/product-tour/ there is an example how you can use it as javascript widget.

nice! any integration with Intercom in plans? Also, found a small typo here http://prntscr.com/fuckqw

Probably, but not in the nearest future. We'll have LiveChat (livechatinc.com) in a few weeks (probably even this month). Thanks for the info about the typo!

Hey Everula, I'm going to be launching something similar with Intercom support soon, and would love to talk to you about your use case and how I can help you. You can email me at calhinshaw@gmail.com! https://www.responseautomator.com/

Why SaaS?

Why not?

Let me rephrase. Why not on-prem?

It’s because in SaaS it is easier to test it, to develop it, to gain new users etc. + we know this model very well :)

Not to mention on-prem means support becomes much more difficult

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