Chatbot integration in few patterns

Chatbots are software agents that are able to interact with humans in natural language. Their intuitive interaction paradigm is expected to significantly reshape the software landscape of tomorrow, while already today chatbots are invading a multitude of scenarios and contexts. This article takes a developer's perspective, identifies a set of architectural patterns that capture different chatbot integration scenarios, and reviews state-of-the-art development aids.Comment: prior version was an incomplete early draft; current version includes changes in references, appropriate acknowledgement; and minor revision

VASTA: A Vision and Language-assisted Smartphone Task Automation System

We present VASTA, a novel vision and language-assisted Programming By Demonstration (PBD) system for smartphone task automation. Development of a robust PBD automation system requires overcoming three key challenges: first, how to make a particular demonstration robust to positional and visual changes in the user interface (UI) elements; secondly, how to recognize changes in the automation parameters to make the demonstration as generalizable as possible; and thirdly, how to recognize from the user utterance what automation the user wishes to carry out. To address the first challenge, VASTA leverages state-of-the-art computer vision techniques, including object detection and optical character recognition, to accurately label interactions demonstrated by a user, without relying on the underlying UI structures. To address the second and third challenges, VASTA takes advantage of advanced natural language understanding algorithms for analyzing the user utterance to trigger the VASTA automation scripts, and to determine the automation parameters for generalization. We run an initial user study that demonstrates the effectiveness of VASTA at clustering user utterances, understanding changes in the automation parameters, detecting desired UI elements, and, most importantly, automating various tasks. A demo video of the system is available here: http://y2u.be/kr2xE-FixjIComment: Submitted to ACM IUI'20, 10 figures, 11 page