Making conversational agents - one step at a time

It's important to understand the terminologies that are used during the development process. Possibly in the future, we'll be working on creating better documentation and information about the project.

Terms:

• Agent - The conversational tool / bot / chatbot, which is the main interface of the project.
  
  To use an agent:
  

    import Agent from 'converse-core'
  
    const ddo = ...
    const config = ...
    const context = ...
  
    const agent = new Agent(ddo, config, context)

• Dialogue Definition Object (DDO) - This is the object that defines how to build the agent. This would have information like what are the responses it should take. How should it attempt to match the user text, and so on.
  
  Example of a simple DDO

  {
      fallbackText: "This is a fallback text",
      dialogues: {
          'bookDialogue': {
              start: 'ask-room',
              nodes: {
                  "ask-room": {
                      text: "Unataka kupangisha chumba aina gani?",
                      matcher: 'room-selector'
                      with: {
                          room_options: [ 'standard', 'king', 'family' ]
                      }
                      goTo: "done"
                  },
                  "done": {
                      text: "Haya, imetosha. Ungependa kurudia?",
                      matcher: "yes_no",
                      goTo: '$'
                  }
              }
          },
       },
       intentions: {
          'greet': {
              toMatch: ['salama', 'habari', 'jasiri'],
              response: 'Habari zako kijani!',
          },
          'room-book': {
              toMatch: ["nataka kupanga chumba", "nataka chumba"],
              dialogueKey: 'bookDialogue'
          },
      },
  }

• Mutation - These are the modification of input that you want your agent to perform as it's processing the input given to the created agent
  
  Here is an example of mutation to remove whitespace around an input and lowercase any input sent to the agent:

  const agent = new Agent(...)
  
  agent.setMutation('preprocess', (input) => input.trim().toLowerCase())
  ...

• Action - These are actions that can be set to execute during a certain time of execution
  
  From the ddo shown above, here is an example of an action that is executed when a user is in the room-booking dialogue

  const agent = new Agent(...)
  agent.dialogue('bookDialogue')
      .setAction('enter', async () => {
          // do something here
      })

This package is still very much under development. If you are using it, do so with caution

• Converse Core - converse-core This is the core package that builds the conversational agents in a basic form. Any modification would be an extension from this class

  yarn add converse-core
  

• Converse Nena - converse-nena This is the agent that makes use of Nena API to give the agent NLP functionalities

  yarn add converse-core converse-nena
  

Contributions currently can only be made by the members of Mary.Africa. However, contributions might be opened up to a select few.