Small talk is a funny thing. In human conversation, it serves to kill time, slightly irritate and save us from awkward water cooler run-ins. In a chatbot, it gives us the power to impress. By filling a bot’s architecture with answers to social inputs like ‘How Are You?’, we not only prevent unnecessary fallbacks. We strengthen our bot with human qualities, which builds an invaluable connection with the user. These social messages are what we call Phatics. Also known as small talk phrases which express a feeling of connection (rather than those which convey information). They could be greetings, random questions or short snippets of conversation. But they’re the difference between a mindless robot and a virtual assistant.
With the help of Rasa NLU model, I have developed a chatbot which is trained to handle those users who love to test the bot by going off topic. Small talk inputs like these are more frequent than you’d think. This model has been made with the thought process of easing through important and time-sensitive processes - like rescheduling a flight - with empathy. Here I have displayed only the UI aspect of the chatbot due to server limitation. You can talk to the bot to know more about this project.
Click on the Robo to interact with him now!
Beep.