Let's Build a bot!

It has become obvious that 2+ hours is a long time for me to lecture, and you guys are looking for something more interactive than just lectures, so I have decided to pivot the latter part of each lecture to some practical bot-building experience.  This can count toward your final project. 

Platforms

Here are some platforms I have found (that look to be free, or free enough for our use):

EdCafe.Ai Links to an external site., the one we demo'd in class, is a rather well behaved RAG-style chat bot.

BotPress.com Links to an external site. is another one that seems to have more capabilities.  I whipped up this Links to an external site. bot in minutes!  Ask it questions about the syllabus!

Twilio Links to an external site. is more complicated, but you can build a voice bot.

Voiceflow.com Links to an external site. looks easy to build voicebots 

All of these allow google suite login - I used my rolston@uw.edu address.  

This is not an exhaustive list, and you're not compelled to use any platform - an old-timey Eliza style experience is fine, too!

The Plan

The idea is that we can time working on a bot, and iteratively improving it. 

First we start with the "happy path" or regularly expected behavior:

Then we can see where it breaks down, how we can improve it, etc.  

Another Approach

Modern technology has made it quite easy to get these to behave.  You can think of these well-behaved bots as your end product, and see how you would break down the sub-tasks - how would you replicate the behavior of one of these (obviously LLM-driven) bots without this technology?  (not everyone feels comfortable deploying LLMs yet).