An engaging chatbot, that educates about preventing cardiovascular disease

I’ve spent the last few days building a chatbot, that shows, how early diagnosis of cardiovascular disease could be increased. I thought you might wanna check it out:

cardibot.com

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How is it a bot if the questions are pre written? :wink:

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Bot ~= Conversational Interface. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Until AI is more advanced and accessible to developers, relying a good amount on decision trees can ensure these things are more useful and less frustrating to users.

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Nice thought man, Keep up the good work. Atleast it will create some sort of awareness among people regarding the Cardiovascular Disease.

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On mobile at least, I can not even type a question of my own. This is not a “bot” in any sense of the way :slight_smile:

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Come on, guys. Give a man a break. Did you expect him to recreate Alexa? If you have gripes about the use of the word “bot,” take it up with the tool he’s using, landbot.io, as that’s what they call the conversational apps they allow you to build with it.

@j0hannes has done a great job.

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No, I don’t.

Not Alexa of course!

But ELIZA :wink:

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We are at all times responsible for the words we use. Especially when the originate from the marketing department of a company.

This is an innovative interface to provide information, will probably work much better than a long page with the same content. It just isn’t a “bot”. What’s wrong with being accurate in our choice of words? :slight_smile:

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No argument there. Though, really, who’s defining the correct use of the term “bot?” Your roomba doesn’t have to have a natural language interface to qualify for the moniker.

The fact is that the words “robot” and “bot” are quite fuzzy. Manufacturing machines, autonomous agents in games and virtual worlds, humanoid automatons, and conversational interfaces of varying levels of sophistication are all described as “robots” or “bots” by reasonable people who are not trying to be deceptive. Why assume that this case is any different?

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How about Wikipedia? :smiley:

Chatbots are typically used in dialog systems for various practical purposes including customer service or information acquisition. Some chatbots use sophisticated natural language processing systems, but many simpler ones scan for keywords within the input, then pull a reply with the most matching keywords, or the most similar wording pattern, from a database.

There is no dialog here just the appearance of one. You could have the same end result (in terms of user interaction) without the pretence of a dialog taking place.

The roomba is not a chatbot, for sure. :smiley: However, it is definitely a semi-autonomous moving bot. It uses a set of sensors and algorithms to determine its position and decide a route.

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I’m not convinced this is a meaningful distinction. Conversational interfaces take the form of a dialog, regardless of whether or not the user is free to form their own inputs.

Most people should not use this type of system for anything other than toys and games. Trying to navigate what amounts to an interactive fiction computer game with no indication of what the system can do and how the system expects commands to be given can be extremely frustrating for the end user who just wants to get the task done. Presenting the user with clickable responses instead of a blank input field is an elegant solution to the usability issues which plague modern chat bots.

Not all Conversational interfaces are powered by a chatbot. In this case, you have a simple list of possible answers that the user navigates through.

To make it short: a chatbot requires an open-ended text input from the user.

Thanks for checking it out!
What an interesting time we live in, discussing what we can call a bot.
And it’s a nice brake from discussing, what pronouns we can use :wink:

Anyway, you can actually ask the bot questions, if you reach certain points in the decision tree. Though the response is just to ask for an email, so I can answer in person :smiley:

In marketing terms, I would call this thing a conversational landingpage.
But officially I wanna call it a bot, because a bot, even if it’s as stupid as this one, is something personified. And choosing out of predefined answers is still a way of talking to it.

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That would be accurate in marketing and technical terms.

Not to sound pedantic, but the word for “something personified” is (I think) “avatar” (“ an incarnation in human form” per Miriam-Webster) :slight_smile:

By the way @j0hannes here’s an interesting series on building a chat bot using Google Dialogflow and zero-to-minimal amount of code.

How to build a chatbot with Dialog flow | Chapter 1 — Introduction
https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-build-a-chatbot-with-dialog-flow-chapter-1-introduction-ab880c3428b5