My own chatbot?

cacats said:

Good morning to all!!

I've been thinking about creating my own chatbot for companies for several days. The chatbot would be in charge of receiving calls from clients and answering them for me (for example, managing appointments: a client calls me to make an appointment and the chatbot tells him what day I will be available for it and, consequently, grant him such an appointment) .

The point is that I presented the idea to several companies and I have many potential clients. But my problem is that it is being more complicated than I thought haha

First of all, the chatbot would have to be hosted on my own server, not the google cloud, for example.

Second, I'm not a programmer and I have no idea what to do ... Where can I start? I was looking for google information, there are companies that "rent" the product: I mean, I pay them to use their chatbot (0.001 € per minute, or something like that).

I want to build it on my own and host it in my own server, so I do not depend on anyone. Would someone be kind enough to tell me how to do it, or give me a link of interest?

Click to expand...

theRevolt said:

-Ok before you start getting hyped up, forget it. First of all, the language you implement this in is secondary, as there is 0% chance you will do this from scratch (with the lack of knowledge you mentioned).
-Best bet is to use chatbot frameworks from IBW, Google etc.
- Next you will realize that it will take a lot of If/Then logic you need to build out combined with some light ML (no true AI)
- Now if even that was not enough you will need to connect to APIs to query calendars, then use said API to book the appointment and output feedback to the client.

While it can be done (I have built some sample bots that take a question use APIs and return the answer), unless you know which platforms you will work with, which APIs you need etc. you won't get very far.

Now, this info is on you to all find and Google, as nobody will spoonfeed you.

PS. You are 100% correct that it is more work than most think. Good luck

Click to expand...

manpower said:

If u have time than start with plain JavaScript and then try to learn node.js socket.io and try to build. Even if u outsource ur project its always better to know how it works.

Click to expand...

cacats said:

Yes, I was planning to outsource it, but I prefer to know what exactly the programmers will be doing and if they want to scam me or not haha

Click to expand...

manpower said:

Exactly. Start learning

Click to expand...

cacats said:

Yes, I was planning to outsource it, but I prefer to know what exactly the programmers will be doing and if they want to scam me or not haha

Click to expand...

cacats said:

Okay, thanks for your help, I will start with javascript, then

Click to expand...

Thecodder said:

I will try to give you the best advices from my programming experience.
The best ideea( in my opinion) is to use a text to speach/ speach to text api for this, like google one but keep in your mind you will get the best results using english language so your chat bot will need to be in english.
Then you can use a programming language like php or python to make an "AI" that will recognize the commands, this part of AI will interpret the user command(obtaining the needed data for an appointment). Then you will need to integrate in your bot another api for the calendar or service that you use to manage your appointments.
To link the soft to a phone number you will need to use another api from a phone call services provider(like twillio for ex). And will be used in this way: you will recive a phone call, you will use the text to speach for playing a welcome message to the user and asking them about the appointment data needed, then you will get the voice query from the user with the phone call service api and you will send this to the speach to text api then the speach to text api will send the user query in plain text to your software, your software will "decrypt" the query with the AI and will check in your appointment API if the appointment can be made on the requested date, then will return the response back to the phone calls services provider.

I hope i gave you all the informations you need to start this project and have an ideea about how needs to be implemented. Sorry for my english!

Click to expand...

cacats said:

You are completely right. Do you know more or less how much it would cost me? I talked with some experts and the govern will pay me half of the project

Click to expand...

Thecodder said:

I will try to give you the best advices from my programming experience.
The best ideea( in my opinion) is to use a text to speach/ speach to text api for this, like google one but keep in your mind you will get the best results using english language so your chat bot will need to be in english.
Then you can use a programming language like php or python to make an "AI" that will recognize the commands, this part of AI will interpret the user command(obtaining the needed data for an appointment). Then you will need to integrate in your bot another api for the calendar or service that you use to manage your appointments.
To link the soft to a phone number you will need to use another api from a phone call services provider(like twillio for ex). And will be used in this way: you will recive a phone call, you will use the text to speach for playing a welcome message to the user and asking them about the appointment data needed, then you will get the voice query from the user with the phone call service api and you will send this to the speach to text api then the speach to text api will send the user query in plain text to your software, your software will "decrypt" the query with the AI and will check in your appointment API if the appointment can be made on the requested date, then will return the response back to the phone calls services provider.

I hope i gave you all the informations you need to start this project and have an ideea about how needs to be implemented. Sorry for my english!

Click to expand...

theRevolt said:

Not into selling this so cannot give you any insights on cost. However, TRUE experts in this field will not be in your range! You can post a Hire a freelancer here to get started

Also, you are talking about a chatbot, which usually refers to a simply assistant on your site that can ask things like what can I help you with today? The user replies, and if you trained your bot well they will be able to respond and book the appointment through an API.

Now layering in a phone to do this, I really do not think this is going to be reasonably priced.
As someone else said, you will need a virtual phone number with API access. Twilio was mentioned, and they actually have some tutorials for a bunch of stuff you can do with them.

Simple outline
- Caller --> Twilio
- Record user audio and send through API call to speech to text (Google cloud , with $300 credit for new signup would be a start)
- response sent to chatbot through API. If you trained well the chatbot will determine appointment needs to be booked and pulls open slots
- Again send text response to now text to speech API (could also be google cloud)
- Send that audio file back to Twilio through API

etc...

You can see how this already gets pretty complex, so definitely not something someone without proper coding knowledge would be able to to.




This is a pretty good start. He won't need the AI component if he uses Chatbot frameworks. They have the right structure to train them and use ML, as doing this from scratch will be a total waste for worse results.

Click to expand...