How to tame your chatbot

Chatbots are getting more and more public attention, often replacing repetitive customer support tasks. Some common frameworks that enable us to “understand” natural language are proprietary and a careless implementation might compromise the privacy of the user and host. We propose a novel type of middleware that allows an easy exchange between natural language understanding (NLU) and messaging platforms, allowing the host to easily switch between multiple platforms. This middleware provides a translation layer between the components that is easily extendable with your own adapters. It also allows the developer to intercept messages at every point so that you can decide what happens with your or the user’s data. Additionally, the information passed to (possibly proprietary) messaging and NLU services is reduced, allowing you to pass the minimum amount of information to third party services which is required to fulfill their respective tasks.