Introducing starchat, an open source, scalable conversational engine for B2B applications

We’ve long been saying that the hype around chatbots might die down one day. People are discovering that not everything becomes instantly better if you wrap it under a conversational UI – some things are better handled with buttons.

However, apart from fun experiments, conversational engines are finding their roles in our increasingly automated society.

It’s still a long road ahead though – after all, if even humans have trouble understanding language sometimes, then it would be very optimistic to demand the same capability from our machines. With that being said, we believe in openness, and that if we want to get to that future where our machines can reasonably understand human commands, allowing them to learn processes the same way as we teach human workers, then we need to build that future together.

The problem is, right now if you want to develop your own chatbot, you have to rely on a closed source NLP engine, either provided by Google, IBM or Facebook. Free-tiers aside, this puts conversational agent companies between a rock and a hard place, as terms can change any time.

That’s why the core of our technology, starchat, is open source. We’re welcoming all developers who are interested in tinkering, experimenting or improving the conversational engine, and to find use cases for it that we haven’t even dreamed of.

At the present, we use it to power customer support roles – by training the system on existing support cases, it can handle a solid portion of customer chats on it’s own, depending on the data quality. The proof is in the pudding, and if our clients are confident enough to trust the technology – because it delivers results – we think you should too.

It’s also very easy to train bots with – and to demonstrate, we have built a FAQ conversational bot about our own business, that you can play around with here.

We’ll be showing off more of the technology in the following days – how we built the bot for example, and how you can do the same with it.

In the meantime, you can get started with starchat here, hosted on GitHub.