Who you Gonna Call?: Building a Chatbot for the Ghostbusters

There was something strange in the neighbourhood of Denver, Colorado this summer at the Xperience19 conference, hosted by Genesys.

The theme for one memorable breakout session on how to build a chatbot was spooky comedy classic Ghostbusters, and as you might expect, plenty of fun was had along the way.

Armed with a Dialog Engine Natural Language Understanding (NLU) model, Intelligent Automation, our Genesys skills, and the Genesys® PureConnect^TM application, our attendees set off to build.

As in all ‘Build-a-Bot’ workshops, a team of experts was in attendance to provide information on how to build a chatbot – but not just any chatbot!

This was a Ghostbusters chatbot, and to get into the ‘spirit’, the Genesys experts were decked out in Ghostbusters hooded jackets, thanks to Joe Ciuffo.

As more businesses embrace bot technology and understand its value, more people come to us for advice and instruction.

This session was no exception, with around 80 keen delegates in attendance. Armed with laptops open and ready to go, Marc ‘Venkman’ Sassoon took to the stage, first asking the audience if they remembered the famous 1984 movie itself (thankfully they all did, despite some being born after the year of release)

He then created a use case: in the movie, Janine, the Ghostbusters’ sarcastic secretary, struggled with customer service. Due to a ghost invasion in New York City, the team’s phone was ringing off the hook, making it tough for Janine to keep up with demand.

This Genesys Ghostbusting team had a solution – it quickly deployed a Genesys artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot that uses Intelligent Automation with Dialog Engine.

Yours truly, Jonathan ‘Stantz’ McKenzie, joined Venkman onstage to showcase the power of these technologies. The process was simple – we just needed to assign it with Dialog Engine utterances, intents, entities, and slot values, before letting it get to work.

Build, test, and update the bot

Armed with this intent – to use a bot to handle customer conversations by chat or voice demand – Marc showed the attendees, in detail, how to build a chatbot using Intelligent Automation. He selected some of the 80-plus pre-built microapps Genesys offers. These include the Intelligent Automation Natural Language Menu microapp, which seamlessly integrates with Dialog Engine NLU.

The chatbot was taking shape.

For the bot, NLU does an analysis of each utterance, classifies the entity, and selects slot values from each utterance, as shown below.

Once Intelligent Automation and the Dialog Engine are configured, flow and NLU combine to deliver the chatbot.

The next step was to test it, with attendees using a conversation about ghosts spotted in the boroughs of New York.

The final task was to make changes to NLU models, update the utterances, add more entity types, and of course have some fun. Each update occurred instantly and was visible in both Intelligent Automation and the chatbot.

Give chatbots and voicebots a try

According to Accenture, well-designed bots can resolve 80 percent of customer interactions. Bots also make it easy for customers to engage with you in the ways they prefer – whether it’s calling to schedule a Ghostbuster, chat online, or self-serve in any number of ways.

Try one of our workshops and see for yourself.

Register for an onsite Build-a-Bot workshop today and take the next step to improved Customer Experience in the digital and AI world.