botpress

**Botpress: The WordPress for Chatbots** **Overview** Botpress is an open-source conversational AI platform used to build, and deploy chatbots. It combines a visual flow editor with powerful NLU (Natural Language Understanding) capabilities. **Architecture** **1. Visual Flow Builder** Draw the conversation logic. - Start → Ask Name → Check Database → Reply. **2. NLU Engine** Understand intent. - User: "I want to buy a laptop." - Intent: `buy_product` - Entity: `category: laptop` **3. Knowledge Base (RAG)** Upload URLs or PDFs. Botpress automatically chunks and embeds them. The bot uses this to answer questions outside the defined flows. **4. Emulator** Test the bot directly in the browser with full debugging info (JSON payloads, NLU confidence scores). **Integration** One-click integrations for: - WhatsApp, Telegram, Messenger, Slack, Webchat. **Botpress Cloud vs Self-Hosted** - **v12 (Legacy)**: Fully open source, self-hosted. - **Cloud (New)**: Managed SaaS, generous free tier, built-in LLM (GPT-4) support. **AI Tasks** You can place "AI Task" cards in the flow. - Input: "User feedback string" - Instruction: "Extract the sentiment and summary." - Output: Variables stored for the next step. Botpress is powerful because it mixes **Deterministic Flows** (Rule-based) with **Generative AI** (LLM-based).