Show HN:[BETA] Chatbot for sending physical poscards from whatsapp

melonpost.com

8 points·theveloped··7 comments

Author here! One of my side projects nearing completion. Terms/Privacy statements are underway so please bear with me for now.

Looking for some advice on getting the dialog as fluid as possible (I'm using dialogflow on the back). Especially address parsing seems like a tricky field so any feedback on this would be most appreciated!

The WhatsApp REST interface will be open-source once fully tested (heavily based on: https://github.com/Rhymen/go-whatsapp).

That's smart and well executed. Congratulations

Glad you like it!

I love chatbots, but I'm not sure creating a postcard is the correct application. There's so many question to answer. If this was a form there would be only 3 fields and could be complete extremely quickly.

I completely agree chatbots can be slow at collecting information. In the case of Melon Post we look at rivaling the speed of a web form at least with orders to a previously used address. At this point, the benefit of being available from your message box and focus on simplicity will hopefully attract it's own little group of loyal customers!

I'm interested to know how you are going to handle user error. If u expect 1 reply but the user send 2 reply will it repeat the same error message twice?

In most cases various error messages for a certain position in the conversation are available. These messages are aimed at nudging the user back into one of the predefined conversational flows or to have them repeat their answer in a different format.

Something the bot still has trouble with is if the user sends a second reply before the answer of the bot is received.

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