Kite: Building conversational bots from mobile apps

Task-oriented chatbots allow users to carry out tasks (e.g., ordering a pizza) using natural language conversation. The widely-used slot-filling approach for building bots of this type requires significant hand-coding, which hinders scalability. Recently, neural network models have been shown to be capable of generating natural “chit-chat” conversations, but it is unclear whether they will ever work for task modeling. Kite is a practical system for bootstrapping task-oriented bots, leveraging both approaches above. Kite’s key insight is that while bots encapsulate the logic of user tasks into conversational forms, existing apps encapsulate the logic of user tasks into graphical user interfaces. A developer demonstrates a task using a relevant app, and from the collected interaction traces Kite automatically derives a task model, a graph of actions and associated inputs representing possible task execution paths. A task model represents the logical backbone of a bot, on which Kite layers a question-answer interface generated using a hybrid rule-based and neural network approach. Using Kite, developers can automatically generate bot templates for many different tasks. In our evaluation, it extracted accurate task models from 25 popular Android apps spanning 15 tasks. Appropriate questions and high-quality answers were also generated. Our developer study suggests that developers, even without any bot developing experience, can successfully generate bot templates using Kite.