[Tonia]

Hi everybody,

it´s great I found you and I hope I can learn a lot here! I´m on of the founders of chatShopper (fashion chatbot on Facebook Messenger) but we started over a year ago with a human backed fashion shopping service. In the second month we received so many requests that we soon had to think of a technical solution to scale our service. Last year in December we build the first chatbot (everybody thought we´re crazy back then) and we have learnt a lot in the last ten months. Since two weeks she (her name is Emma) is able to handle English requests - we still need a lot more data to train her.
My vision is that one day besides searching products for you (which will fit your taste very well because until then she knows a lot about you) she becomes your friend. I´m already in love with the future Emma and I hope we achive to build her!
At the moment we want to build a conversational chatbot and later merge the two. I would love your ideas/learnings on how you would start this, which tools I should have a look etc. I´m not a developer myself (but I started to program) but my cofounder.

Looking forward to meet many great people here 👋
Antonia

[infurl]

No doubt you are aware of the recent momentum put behind commercial applications of chatbots by Facebook's decree that they will be the way of the future. Facebook has a website https://wit.ai/ which is a first step towards implementing such things on such a massive scale. It appears to have very sophisticated parsing capabilities, ideal for gathering data, but it's scripting and output are still a little limited. I expect that will change quickly though, given the resources backing it.

In addition to wit.ai there are a number of AIML based solutions out there. Other members would be in a better position to advise you about those. You should also create an account on http://chatbots.org and ask there. That website specialises in chatbot technology and has a lot of members in common with this website.

[Freddy]

Hello Antonia, welcome to the site 

[Art]

Nice to have you here, Antonia! It's always good to see new members or just visitors.

Infurl has given you some sound advice and some of us frequent that site as well. You can learn a lot right here by browsing through our various postings and archives. Don't hesitate to ask questions.
Enjoy your stay!

[kei10]

Welcome, Tonia! Greetings.
Emma chatter bot, looks interesting!

[Tonia]

Thank you all for welcoming me!

We do use wit.ai at the moment and I looked at AIML but I doubt if with these you´ll create something really amazing. Regarding the functionality ("fashion shopping") wit.ai was quite useful but to enable further communication I doubt if this is possible (we´re currently building something with it to give it a try). With AIML it´s too time consuming and not flexible enough. I would love to dive into Deep Learning for that use case, anybody has more reading resources?
If you want to give our bot a try: http://m.me/chatshopper
German works quite well, with English we´re still in training.

[infurl]

That was quite impressive. It took only three questions for it to find a hat that I liked, although after that, when I asked for more suggestions it became fixated on baseball caps which aren't really suitable for Australian conditions.

[Art]

Not everyone uses Facebook...