Creating the chatbot

Post date: Oct 18, 2014 12:12:23 PM

Chat bots

As you know, the chat-bot is a chatting robot that can understand what you are saying, analyse it and give you a suitable response. It's considered to be a serious branch in AI development, as the purpose of programming a chatbot is to help people obtain information. Examples include:

  • Selling chat bots: These help people to know item prices and offers.

  • Supporting chat bots: You may find this kind of chat bot on websites that offer products and services.

  • Help desk (information desk) chat bots: You may find these in large libraries, websites or programs.

  • Entertaining chat bots: These are made for fun and chatting.

In 1966, Eliza, the first chat bot, was created by Joseph Weizenbaum.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology provides techniques for developing computer programs that carry out a variety of tasks, simulating the intelligent way of problem-solving by humans. The problems that humans solve in their day-to-day lives are of a wide variety and in different domains. Although the domains are different and so are the methods, AI technology provides a set of formalism's to represent the problems as well as techniques for solving them.

What AI technology provides us is what is described in the above sentences. Based on this, it is very difficult to precisely define the term "artificial intelligence."

Creating a Chat-bot is a common task which people enjoy, we can all create something the same value as SIRI. the technology for Artificial intelligence has not surpassed this type of brain response although many make the claim to have completed creating an AI. Here we shall build our own version of the AI's which are available.

Building your chat bot

Before building your chat bot, you have to understand that any chat bot consists of three main parts:

  • Input text: This is where you are going to write what you want to say to your chat bot.

  • Sending button: This allows you to send your input to be analysed before getting the output.

  • Output text: This is where your chat bot is going to give its response

The most important part is the sending button, as it contains all of the processes that analyse your input before copying the result to the output. For this reason, I will call the sending button the Artificial Intelligence Base (AI Base).

The AI Base principles

Any dialogue has a beginning and ending, like saying "Hello"-"Hey"-"Good morning"-"Hi, how are you?" etc. We always hear these sentences when two people start talking. There are also other situations that don't need these sentences to begin, like "Excuse me, what is the time?" etc. On the other hand, we hear other sentences like, "I have to go now" - "bye, see you later" - "I'll call you later" - "looking forward to see you," etc. These sentences are usually used at the end of conversations.

This video gives a basic example of creating a chat interface:

The project language is visual basic, it contains a single form with a two text boxes,

one for input and one for output:

The source are created with Visual Studio 2013, this is the first video of the series.

Download the file below to follow this video and build your own UI