I started working on the chatbot and have decided against the Amazon tools. I’m currently torn between Dialogflow and Chatfuel. For the booking process, a menu/buttons chatbot is more than enough, but for the recommendations or the Q&A, one with AI is important. Dialogflow is great in terms of AI and the bot understanding context, differentiating intents, training and etc. It supports voice commands too, and the same bot can be integrated into different platforms, i.e. my app, FB messenger, website (for scalability). But doesn’t offer a simpler type of chatbot or a “hybrid”, so it makes the booking process more complicated than it should be (which is the main reason for the chatbot). Chatfuel, on the other hand, allows me to build a simple straightforward menu bot and i can then connect Dialogflow to it and add AI for the other functions. However, it does not support voice, and can only be exported to one place, FB messenger.
I tried weighing out the pros and cons of each and they’re both convincing! I was thinking of going with Chatfuel and sacrificing voice for a better and easier booking process, but then hypothetically if the voice bot was great, it would make everything else easy and the user wouldn’t even need to use their phone (I’ve been heavily inspired by the book “The Best Interface Is No Interface”). I also checked other bot-building tools and none are as good or as recommended as the two above. Also, none support Arabic so that’s out of the window too.
After having this discussion with my supervisor, I decided to stick with Dialogflow and I started building the bot – Ashes.
