Internship Stories
Shibbu Singh,
Developer, IDFC First Bank
July, 2023
My Experiences building a Cricket Assistant for the Sport Lover using Kore.ai XO platform
When I joined the Full Stack Developer course at Gradious, little did I know we would be having some fun while learning cutting-edge technology. One of the course requirements was to work on a live project. I was very excited when I learned we would create a virtual assistant using the Kore.ai platform. And icing on the cake – I get to work with my passion – cricket!!!
Let me explain. A Virtual Assistant is a tool which can answer all your queries on a particular subject and a means to get relevant updates and information on that topic. So using the Kore.ai Virtual Assistant Conversation Builder, I designed a Cricket Assistant. This works as your buddy to give answers to all cricket-related queries. These include queries related to matches, team players, and past match scores. Also this bot notifies you about your favourite team’s upcoming matches. Cool, isn’t it?
Overview
The bot can be accessed over the Web or via Telegram channel.
Users need to register to use the bot. While registering, apart from email and phone number, the user is prompted to share their favourite team This information is used to provide updates regarding that particular team’s upcoming matches etc.
Some of the use cases I have implemented include:
displaying live scores of the ongoing matches,
listing the five top current news regarding cricket,
giving the details of upcoming match schedules,
team and player information,
listing the team rankings in different series,
player career stats such as runs scored, balls played, etc in different series,
series information – users can check upcoming matches in a particular city or past matches’ scores and player performances.
I integrated Cricbuzz APIs into the bot, to get all the relevant information pertaining to IPL, T20, and test series for both men’s and women’s cricket matches.
Apart from these, I also included FAQs – a static list of question-answers to answer simple queries based on my own knowledge and with Google search engine’s help.
Bot Features
I really enjoyed exploring the various features offered by the Kore.ai platform to enhance the Cricket Assistant’s user experience and make it more interactive.
To mention a few features that enhance the bot capabilities:
Live scores from the ongoing matches are displayed as soon as the user logs in
One of the many cool features of the platform was – the Alert Task.
Using this feature I ensured that the user gets notified of various updates at regular intervals. 
Multi-turn Conversation prompts the user when they are not sure like asking if the user wants to know when the next match of their favourite team is being played or giving them options like presenting a list of batsmen from a specific team to choose from for further details. Pre-assignment of entities enabled the smooth flow from one dialog task to another.
Sentiment Management helped me in giving a personal touch to the Cricket Assistant and triggering Agent Transfer in case the bot detects frustration in the user’s tone.
Contextual Intelligence allowed me to enable the bot to answer user queries without asking too many questions. For example, when the user says when is the next match, based on the previous conversation the bot will be able to understand which team’s match the user is referring to.
I also got to work with various templates to display the results in multiple formats like widgets, lists, tables, digital views, and much more.
By enabling Telegraph Channel I have given the user an option to use Cricket Assistant from Telegraph also.
In Conclusion
If you are a cricket buff like me, you would never want to miss out when your favorite team is playing. The Cricket Assistant does precisely that, it notifies you ahead of time!!! Using the Alert Task feature, I could ensure that the users get notifications every 24 hours about their favorite team’s upcoming matches. I used the information gathered at the time of user sign-up about their favourite team. Of course, the assistant seeks the user’s permission before sending notifications.
Though integrating different channels, botkit, and agent transfers for the first time was a bit complicated, it was a learning experience. Once I got the hang of it, I realized that it was not that complicated after all. I really enjoyed and learnt a lot while working on this project.
