I’m new to developing ai bots. I plan to design a bot that could be used as help desk attendant instead of a human. Also it would be easier to use drop downs and other dialogue box entities so I’ll try to implement those in the app, to get the keywords of the problem faster. 
  The problem is design a method to ask the next question to converge to the problem asked by the user. need help asap please

Hello, Ratna, and welcome to chatbots.org

Ok, let’s start with the simple questions first. Will this be a web-based solution, or will it have some other form of interface? Also, what sort of resources are available that can be used to complete your project, and how much time per day/week can you devote to it? And lastly, what skillsets are available to you that directly relate to your project?

Thank you for replying Dave.

Yes it would be web-based solution.
I’ve got approx. 40 days to develop and I plan to devote 6-7 hours daily on it.
By resources if you meant already present code, then i dont have much but I do have a person to work on it together.
Skillsets :- web programming using PHP, MySQL and Java.

Good! You have something that you can work with.

I assume that you also have access to your own web server? If so, what OS/ server software, and is there also access to a MySQL database?

You’re also going to need to be able to sit down for a few hours with an experienced Help Desk technician, so that you can map out not only likely questions and statements that a customer is likely to say, and the correct responses, but also to get an idea of some of the myriad unlikely things that a customer could say. If you can’t do that, then the next best thing would to obtain some transcripts of Help Desk conversations, that can be used to build a database of response rules. Once that’s done, you can examine the database, and expand upon it, adding certain “human” details that will help to improve the customer’s experience, and trust me when I say that this is a VITAL portion of the process.

Mostly, what I meant by “resources” was man-hours and money, since setting up a project of this type is fairly time intensive, and since the people you’ll need to hire to assist you don’t exactly come cheap, with the limited time frame you have. I don’t mind committing a few minutes here and there to advise on projects like this at no charge, because that’s what I do for fun, but the kind of assistance you’re going to need is on another level from that.

Now, as far as my recommendations, the simplest way to handle it would be to use Program O, and to create your own AIML database from scratch. The project you’re wanting to develop here is just too focused, and too “purpose driven” to use any of the current AIML sets available to you, and trying to adapt an AIML set for your purposes will take more time than simply building your own “from the ground up”. From my experience, going about this any other way would be a waste of time and other resources. Of course, this is just my opinion, but…

You should take a look at the help agent on Paypal. It’s a sort of hybrid between chat and focused Q&A.  It starts asking questions related to the problem until it gets to what it thinks is the answer. It also offers “one-click” answering as an alternative to typing yes/no.

https://www.paypal-virtualchat.eu/uk/

I’m guessing call centre scripts have this sort of structure already, so once you’ve identified the broad topic, the Q&A involves navigating through a tree until an answer is reached.

Good idea, Oliver! That could, indeed, provide some useful insights.

I of course wish you well but I would seriously doubt anyone can do this in just 40 days. Please prove me wrong.

Given enough motivation and manpower, it’s possible, I think. Expensive, but possible.

Hi Ratna,
Welcome to the forums!

Chatbots for helpdesks? This market is steadily growing! If you carefully looking at our homepage, you’ll notice that we even have a category customer service chatbots which is by far our largest category with 238 entries and sales chatbots with 118 entries.

Chatbots applied for customer self service are also often referred to as virtual assistant or virtual agent.

95% of the professional vendors listed in our AI companies area are active in this field.

Lots of inspiration! Good news: we don’t have chatbots for helpdesks in India yet, although I personally know a few companies who are starting their business in India right now.

Erwin
p.s. don’t forget to add a resembling picture to your profile! Makes everything much more personal!

Hello Ratna

Welcome to the forum!, in my opinion 40 days is a hurry, but it depends greatly on what kind of bot you want to build.
We did a project once, only pattern matching for fun an it took 4 people and 4 months to get something decent out of there. Even if you start from a big free-AIML database,  on program O

This bot will chat as… this database you’ve got… that’s all!

So, you have to edit a new database from scratch, and learn how to code in AIML all the logic.

The second problem is the language, if in English… more better! AIML ... loves English

Second, for a help desk, there is a big counterstrike using AIML (on my belief), that you have to make complicated labeling-cascade to get a good conditional ‘reasoning’, even with yes and no questions.

I’ve hear there are lots of good editors out there, even ones who build AIML automatically from text (never proved them) but may be a good start.!
Even with those tools, I guess, unless you prove to have a 200 IQ-brain and 8 right-hands, that you may master AIML in this time AND got the bot to work reasonably well from scratch. AIML needs a lot of ass-hours to build.

Also as Dave told you, I agree you will need a lot of help of qualified people and those are not cheap, to accomplish all on schedule, perhaps he or Erwin can lead you into some good consultants on this, I am sorry, I don’t know anybody skilled on AIML but they surely do..

So good Luck!
:p

Here’s the fastest customer service robot I can do in PHP in 40 minutes:

http://79b.org/customerservice/

:-p

I dont understand, its repeating the same stuff over and over again….?
Is this a joke ?

Hi Andy!

Well…Yeah, it’s making fun of customer service, but ain’t most customer services like that?

Not to kill the funniness, Andy, but the PHP code is a fully functional as a chatbot interface.

I think you have a point.  It’s probably best to plugin a ELIZA chatbot Perl Module or somethin’ there.

Maybe I’ll do that later.  Thanks for your awesome feedback!

UPDATE to our customer service robot…

New and improved ! 

Now with her very own text to speech…

http://79b.org/customerservice/

8PLA
What TTS are you using?
(it sounds well) not like Festival
Where can I get the code/pkg to test it ?
Does it work also for Spanish?
- thanks

Thank You all,
  I’m relieved a bit as now I’ve some insight into the problem. Program O and AIML would be the best way I’ve got in the time frame I have got. Thanks Dave for this idea
  I think I’ll go with the idea of yes or no. It would be the fastest to navigate through a tree. I think I’ll be needing a lot of help on this.