When we started our voice enabled/chatbot journey, we quickly realized that there is a strong need to separate business from conversational logic. Business logic is how you access and what you do with your data or functionalities, while conversational logic defines the communication process between the system and the end users.
In short, you want your programmers to solve only technical issues, and you want someone more customer-oriented to build interaction with your users.
That’s why we defined a conversation as a stream of reusable components which are used through the GUI. Developers are able to add new functionalities with adding new components to the system, while publishers can easily build skills through the GUI.
As you might have noticed, we define two main types of roles within Convoworks: developers, and publishers.
Developers are required when you need custom integration or additional features. We have a separate section of documentation for developers specifically.
Publishers are more business orientated personnel, mostly webmasters, which have some technical skills but aren’t actual programmers. While it’s not necessarily always the case, publishers will usually hire developers when the need for new functionality arises.
As mentioned, it is not required of publishers to be programmers, but some basic programming knowledge is desired (variables, if/then/else, goto…).
In this section you can find information on how to use Convoworks’ GUI, the basic concepts behind it, and how to create and manage your conversational services.
What is the best way to learn Convoworks?
We recommend that you first use and follow Tutorial – Getting started which reviews Convoworks functionalities in such a way that you can easily follow instructions and end up with a functional conversational service.
You can also simply import one of our ready to run templates and just experiment with it. If you have basic programming knowledge, and you are used to use various “composers”, it should be quite easy to conclude how the system works. We’ve set up tons of helpful little tooltips and short descriptions to help you figure stuff out on the fly while you’re using the GUI.
What is the hardest part?
When you start using Convoworks, you’ll soon realize that the creation and management of conversation is actually the fun part. The most painful part is actual deployment onto target platforms and their app stores. They usually have a lot of descriptive fields to populate, different types of screenshots you have to provide and a review process you have to pass. That is something you’ll have to learn separately since each vendor has wildly different requirements and procedures.
A comparable example would be Unity development and publishing apps on the Apple App store or Google Play. It is (relatively) easy to develop a cross-platform mobile game, but then publishing it on an app store is something completely different and can vary from store to store.
Summary
- Developers are required only if you want to extend Convoworks functionality
- There are ready to run service templates you can start with in no time
- You’ll have to study the platforms you want to publish skills on separately, though we do provide seamless integration with the most popular ones for initial deployment
