Best practices in design conversational AI in integration with Business Software

Good thoughts here regards linking business software to Conversational AI.  Intro below:

Further thoughts on integrating business process and Conversational AI.  Examining for a particular application.   I like the implication of writing a 'story of use'  to make sure it addresses goals effectively.   Read rest of article, non technical.

Best practices in design conversational AI in integration with business software

By Andrew Rudchuk    in TowardsDataScience   Founder @ Hala.ai 

Intro

In this article, I will try to describe designing the conversational AI in integration with back-end software.

Real example: Create a bot for adding time activities by employees. With time activity, you can specify the date, time spent on some task, assign it to a project or customer, and in addition to that, specify the hourly rate and if it is billable or not.

Step 1 — Define Intents

To design the intents in many cases, I am trying to communicate with the bot’s future users. You can write a story and explain the purpose of your request to provide different examples of utterances (intents) that they can use in the bot for adding new time activity. This step aims to have real-time examples from the users, and it is not only for training the intents and getting higher confidence for it but also for designing the bot in the most appropriate way.

Of course, you can design the utterances on your own and start the design of the flow, but in the end, this could lead to additional work because you would need to rebuilt everything.  .... ' 

Whats Best?

I like the pieces from Think with Google, good to follow.

We often addressed the problem when dealing with the term 'Optimal', which often followed with the question:  In what context?  under what Constraints?    When we use 'best' there are often many implied constraints in our search or request.  Its also common to include in conversation.  Search, Google's language of interaction, is a conversation, and includes common sense interpretations of 'Best'.

Ask a researcher: What does ‘best’ really mean?
Ken Wheaton August 2018 Mobile, Search, Consumer Insights

It seems fairly straightforward. When people set out to shop for an item or service, they hope to end up with the best possible outcome. But it turns out that “the best” isn’t an objective absolute. In fact, finding “the best” isn’t necessarily about finding the best thing that exists, it’s about finding the best thing for your needs.

It was pretty clear to us from consumer search data that people’s quest for the best is still on the rise. Mobile searches for “best” have grown over 80% over the past two years.1 And they’re searching for “best” for even the smallest stuff: We’ve seen strong growth in things like “best toothbrush” over the past couple years. ....  "

Algorithmia: Best Practices for Algorithm Design

Have not looked at Algorithmia for a while. It is branded as a marketplace for algorithms. Nice idea, don't know how well it is doing. 

They now have a good blog post on Best Practices for Algorithm Design:

Nicely done, lots of good thoughts on the problems. Includes code snippets.   Should be read.  BUT not a word about any kind of inherent bias in the designs. That is a high level decision, certainly, but probably one of the most important considerations to consider.   The bias may come from the particular context of the data used to derive the algorithm.  So the algorithm also must include all the context,  but I have found that is rarely done.

" ... We host more than 4000 algorithms for over 50k developers. Here is a list of best practices we’ve identified for designing advanced algorithms. We hope this can help you and your team. ... "

What is Algorithmia?

" ... Home
Welcome to the Algorithmia Developer Center. Here you can find guides showing how to use the Algorithmia Clients in the language of your choice, find tutorials for Working with Data on Algorithmia, learn how to Write your own Algorithm or Host your Data Model using frameworks such as Scikit-learn or Tensorflow.   .... "