Ask HN: Building a simple conversational UI – what libraries should I look at?

  • Being on Python, you have the great advantage of having access to NLTK :-) http://www.nltk.org/ - it's pretty intense and offers a lot, but also includes some example bots: http://www.nltk.org/api/nltk.chat.html

    My personal advice, though, is while you can definitely try to support a more 'natural' type of language, you do want to define fixed formats for commands in your documentation/help so as not to confuse users or encourage them to keep trying all sorts of variations to figure out what magic combo makes your bot work.

  • You might find AIML useful. I don't know much about the state of AIML interpreters in Python, but I'm guessing there is at least one good one.

  • www.converse.ai has an API you can use. Works cross platform - gives you Slack, SMS, chat etc out the box.