Hi everybody,

I’m writing a kind of chatbot dedicated for providing specific services and can chat about specific topics.

As the scripts become large and complex, I need your advice on how to design the conversation flow outside of the code. I think I need some sort of visualisation tool but any tip will help.

Thanks in advance,

Sam

AFAIK, this is still an unsolved problem in conversational AI.  Dialog acts are the represented intents behind dialog.  In the scientific literature, the dialog manager is generally, but not exclusively, the dialog system component concerned with dialog flow.  The study of dialog is known as discourse analysis.

Dialog Act:

- Dialog Act & Chatbots | Meta-Guide.com

Dialog Manager:

- Dialog Management Middleware | Meta-Guide.com
- Dialog Management Module | Meta-Guide.com
- Dialog Manager | Meta-Guide.com
- Olympus/Ravenclaw Dialog Management Framework | Meta-Guide.com

Discourse Analysis:

- 100 Best Discourse Analysis Videos | Meta-Guide.com
- Computational Discourse | Meta-Guide.com
- Computational Discourse Analysis | Meta-Guide.com
- Discourse Analysis & Chatbots | Meta-Guide.com
- Discourse Parser 2013 | Meta-Guide.com
- Discourse Unit & Dialog Systems | Meta-Guide.com

Recently, I’ve run across a few references to systems of this kind.  One is the proprietary and unreleased toytalk.com authoring platform called “PullString”.  ToyTalk’s PullString has been compared to Facade game engine ABL (A Behavior Language).  Another recent reference is Negobot, a controversial, forensic conversational agent based on game theory.

Façade (interactive story):

- 100 Best Facade Interactive Story Videos | Meta-Guide.com

Toytalks engine is based initially on ChatScript, as a rewrite and supporting other features

Thanks for the responses,

I’ve looked into Olympus and it looks very interesting. I might try to take some concepts from it such as the separation of the problem into layers and writing task oriented agents.

But building olympus seems to be very difficult. if someone has experience with building olympus on windows / linux and can help that would be lovely.