Chatbots, as they exist today, do not have much capability to understand natural human language. And this is one of the main reasons why most of the messaging apps(Messenger, Kik etc) are resorting to a mix of graphical and text UI in their bot platforms — think of buttons, carousels, image cards and not just text responses.

We, at Tars, are using browser as a platform to build our own chat interface for bots to operate. And this gives us complete liberty on what all components we have. If you have tried any of our bots(if you haven’t, first try one out here and here), you would know that we strongly support the graphical UI + text based approach. As a part of this thought process, we have created a number of custom keyboard inputs in our front-end interface to facilitate different user interactions and situations.

Messenger, Kik, Telegram are huge platforms where developers are deploying hundreds of bots each day. I still feel these messaging platforms have not done enough on the front-end components to help a botmaker create enriching user interactions.

And that’s why, I wanted to talk more about how we went about creating each custom UI, why each one of them makes sense and how the lack of them screws up user interactions right now.

So here we go :

Date and Time Scroller

Think of a scenario where you need to ask a user when he would like to make the appointment for? There can be multiple ways of giving the same information.

25th Nov, 25th November, Nov 25th, 25/11, 25–11–2016, 11/25/16 — all of them essentially mean the same but it becomes difficult for a machine to make sense of this data.

This is why we have incorporated a date and time scroller where users can roll the dials and select the date/time.