Do you talk to Siri or Alexa like they are a personal friend of yours? Intelligent agents and voice technology has exploded over the last three years. Our appliances, cars and HVAC systems talk to us. Now you can build your own intelligent agent without the need to have programming skills.
Amazon Alexa’s Skills has some great templates. Their Blueprint Skills page provides easy to use templates that cover topics from telling jokes, quiz games, and corporate applications.
Google has DialogFlow which provides templates and tools to incorporate, the built-in functions of your device, like time, location, directions etc. DialogFlow had a longer learning curve for me but I can certainly see the benefits of using this to create your own bots. It will even begin to “learn” how to accept inputs that may not be word for word what it needs to listen for but will begin to accept variations of what you are asking the bot for.
They also offer Actions as an extension of their Google Assistant with some pretty easy to use templates.
There are several new companies forming to provide you with a nice user-friendly tool to build your own bot.
Here are some tips to think about when you are building your bot.
- Do you want your bot to have a specific persona
Facebook bot agent
- Who are your target users, do they have a device that works with this platform or can they install an app to interact with the platform you are building your bot for
- You need to think about what response you want the bot to provide if the user is giving it an input it doesn’t understand.
- Does your bot need to be private or secure
- Do you want to collect what someone is saying to the bot
Both Amazon and Google have free options which are a great way to play around with them at no risk. Have fun and test it out, you’d be surprised how easy it can be to build your own intelligent agent.
