Volume 10, Number 01, January 2020

Revisit Dialogflow in an English Teaching Virtual Assistant use Case

  Authors

M.S. Tran¹, T.H. Tran², Q.D. Tran³ and D.T. Nguyen¹, ¹AI Lab, Topica Holding, Vietnam, ²University of Technology and Education, Vietnam and ³Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Vietnam

  Abstract

We deployed a conversation chatbot as a virtual assistant teaching English via Internet. The system was developed on the base of Moodle as Learning Management System and DialogFlow as Dialogue Management System. It is interesting that the crucial problem we had to face here is the lack of an efficient authoring tool in order to generate in mass the dialog scenarios fed into Moodle and DialogFlow. In our concrete case - teaching English for beginners - the Dialogflow platform seems to be a cumbersome tool. Especially with bad internet connection, sending messages back and forth to Dialogflow may degrade smooth conversation experience. We therefore built an authoring tool to fasten up the conversation rules generation. We also replace Dialogflow with a local browser-based dialogue management engine. The lessons taught with our systems – our English teaching virtual assistant – seem interesting to students and receive encouraging feedbacks.

  Keywords

Chatbot, Dialogflow. Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing

Conference Proceedings