Bot Frameworks

I get this question a lot. “How does Watson compare to Dialogflow?” “What do you think of LUIS?” So I am going to discuss my opinions in this article. Disclaimers The first disclaimer is that I am clearly biased. I actually work with clients to help them out in their Dialogflow projects. At the same time, I am hoping this post starts a discussion amongst people and helps people do some homework before selecting the appropriate framework. The second disclaimer is that I haven’t had time to actually work on bots using the other frameworks, and used my knowledge of Dialogflow to consider what I feel are the important features. Then I watched a bunch of online tutorials to check…

Some readers have sent me feedback which suggests that they started using Dialogflow thinking it is a really low code tool, only to discover that it is a lot more complex once you go past the toy chatbots. At the same time, I also think that of all the major bot frameworks, Dialogflow provides the best tradeoff in terms power vs ease of use. My definition of a low code bot framework isn’t one which requires the least amount of code, but rather one which gives the best separation of responsibilities between developer, bot copywriter, and the person who asks for the bot to be built. Unfortunately, some features can change Dialogflow from a low code tool to a mo'(re)…

I have already written an article about how you need a developer for creating a reasonably useful Dialogflow chatbot. In my previous article, I mentioned some high-level reasons why a coder would be very useful when building a Dialogflow bot. In this article, I get more specific. Here are some questions people asked me recently. All of these are normal questions you will face when building a bot. In other words, you will run into at least one of these questions when you create your own bot. How exactly does Dialogflow know what intent to match each request to? This is what someone asked me in the comments section of my YouTube channel. The answer is: only the Google (Dialogflow…

My client was feeling a bit upset. His long term programmer-partner was not interested in working on my client’s new proposal which involved chatbots. Why? “Chatbots are overhyped and useless” – according to the programmer-partner. Maybe you are feeling the same way. Here is what I suggested to my client – instead of calling it a chatbot, sell it to your partner as a “NLU powered digital assistant”. After all, that’s just as accurate, and probably a lot less of a loaded term today. The problem with the word chatbot As you can see, I am not a big fan of using the word chatbot, especially when it is used to describe software which doesn’t actually use NLU. At the…

Recently, I received a comment on my post which talks about whether Dialogflow is open source. The comment linked to an open source chatbot framework, and helped me remember that I have wanted to write a post on this topic for a while now. In my view, it is possible to measure the flexibility and power of a chatbot framework by using it to develop the following types of chatbots. That is, in my view, building out a set of about 7 chatbots is plenty to get a very good idea of the capabilities of a bot framework. Note: Some of the links on this page might point to a paid course of mine. But you don’t have to purchase…