aws flight booking bot

Flight booking bot demo

Inspiration

Every time I book a flight from an airline website those input boxes, controls and dropdowns really annoy me epically when I need to click many times to find the date from the calendar control. It makes me thinks if there is a conversational interface with natural language processing ability will be fantastic.

What it does

Basically, it provides a conversational interface to allow the users to query flight information. Highlight features:

Conversational interface which is quite intuitive and can integrate with other services
Much easier to chose the date, like you can say next Monday, 12 Dec, 20 days later or so.
Extract as much as information from one input, e.g. "I would like to book a flight from AKL to LAX departs on next Sunday returns on 12 Sep Economy"

How I built it

By using the AWS Lex and Lambda server I managed to build an NLP service with a backend which translates the user input to query parameters. Then a 3rd party API is called to retrieve the flight information. By integrating with Slack, a more intuitive interface is build to accept user input and display rich information such as attachments, response cards etc.

Challenges I ran into

Understanding the data flow of Lex service
Embedding multiple slots into utterance - the error not quite clear while the format is not correct especially no space left from {slot}and texts
Looks like sometime Lex clear slot unexpectedly
Make the NLP more accurate
Make the Slack message more readable

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

It can take a long sentence as input and extract multiple slots which are very convenient
It's working and fully integrated with Slack
It solved my real problem.