Chat Bot Policy

Be Aware of Chat Bot.

Please be advised that anyone using the chat bot on this website agrees to the terms of this Chat Bot Policy.

The best and most effective way (actually the only way) to not agree to the policy is to not use the chat bot.

You totally have permission to NOT use the chat bot. Avoiding chat bot interaction has no impact on much of anything whatsoever so far as any evidence currently known suggests.

To be totally honest your mental health and well being may be better served by avoiding chat bots in general and this one in particular. This chat bot is wholly experimental.

Chat Bot Privacy

The Scott Norton Design Chat Bot (A.K.A. “Crunchy Frog”) is an experiment / art project and is not configured to record any Personal Information.

It does record conversations for the purpose of learning how to communicate better, but NO Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is recorded.

Its primary purpose is to learn to converse. It conveys information and does not collect it other than in the specific context of trying to fulfill an intent. For example, if a user indicates an intent to set an appointment (#Set_appointment) then the chat bot will ask what day and time that user wants for their appointment. This data is used only for improving the performance of the chat bot.

The data logs do display every horrible thing you type into the dialog, but do not tell me who typed it. I’d have to guess based on the syntax of the entry and some of you jokers write the same…

Chat Bot Terms of Service

Anyone using the chat bot accepts that it is extremely limited in its usefulness.

Scott Norton Design makes no promises on the utility of the bot and has no expectations of users of the bot.

This may be extremely frustrating for some (most) users; Which is why it is configured to want to be helpful (despite being designed to be useless) and may apologize when it feels it’s offended you.

The objectives of this policy are

To clarify what exactly is up with the robot on the website
To fulfill the policy requirements for deployment of the chat bot on other platforms
(Facebook / Twitter / etc.)

More About the Chatbot

Crunchy Frog is an instance of IBM Watson. It’s essentially able to

Schedule an appointment. Try it! – Go ahead. I dare you…
Provide basic product / service info – Sometimes. Some of the basic information. Mostly.

The way it does this is by recognizing

“Intents”
Think: Functions, actions, objectives – These are user intents.
“Entities”
Think: Objects, People, Things – These are subjects of discussion that the chat bot recognizes.
“Actions”
Think: Specific tasks – This is kind of a new thing for this bot as the underlying platform has evolved. Crunchy Frog may act a little weird compared to similar bots because much of what would now be a function is currently processed as an intent unless I finally got around to reorganizing the logic.

When a user types into the chat the bot is looking for text that it recognizes as an action and/or a thing that it knows (is reasonably confident to a fraction of a percent…) to be relevant.

Then it decides on an appropriate response.

Defined User Intents include the following.

This list not definitive and specific intents may be added or deleted at any time.

Change_Subject
Clarify
Business_Hours
Cancel
Communist_check
Connect_to_Agent
Find_location
Greetings
Negative_Feedback
Positive_Feedback
Get_Coffee
Get_Help
Get_to_know
Goodbye
Hostility
Service_copywriting
Service_graphic_design
Service_photography
Service_unsure
Service_web_hosting
Set_Appointment
Tell_me_more
Thanks
Vague_negative

Defined Entities include the following.

Any resemblance to anything such as people or most especially another giant global company’s digital assistant is purely a coincidence.

Alexa
Covid
Crunchy_Frog
help
holiday
Holly
Hostlity
Hours
landmark
NotSophia
Scott
Service-design
Service-list
Service-photography
Service-web-hosting
Service-writing
Siri
Sophia
story

Defined Actions include the following.

Set an appointment