First steps with a chatbot interface

I have been trying some chatbots and reading everything I could find about the subject. I understand that a single purpose bot would be a better starting point, avoiding the complexities and the required Natural Language Processing that a more general assistant would have.

The company I work for is mainly focused on media content like movies and tv shows and we had the idea to give our Electronic Programming Grid a more friendly and human interface.

With this goal, Mr. Movies was born:

The basic principle is simple: A chatbot that would help final users to get something to watch. To keep it simple, the text input would search for titles in our database.

And some menu actions would give users some advanced search/filter options like Channels and Genres.

Also, Mr. Movies provides users with the option of rate the content in a very easy way.

So even with this humble start, we should be able to help users picking their next flick and by doing this we can learn from them by filling our database with trending search terms and user preferences.

In the future this will allow us to recommend content, to notify new releases that a particular user may like and send other meaningful notifications. All of this with instant feedback!

Current limitations and planned features

These are our first steps with this user interface, so, we know there is a lot of room for improvements like:

The current version runs on NodeJS and records search terms, likes and dislikes on a MySQL database.

This is my first Medium post, please send me your comments and suggestions!

Thanks!

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