Botpress

Botpress: The WordPress for Chatbots

Overview
Botpress is an open-source conversational AI platform used to build, and deploy chatbots. It combines a visual flow editor with powerful NLU (Natural Language Understanding) capabilities.

Architecture

1. Visual Flow Builder
Draw the conversation logic.
- Start → Ask Name → Check Database → Reply.

2. NLU Engine
Understand intent.
- User: "I want to buy a laptop."
- Intent: `buy_product`
- Entity: `category: laptop`

3. Knowledge Base (RAG)
Upload URLs or PDFs. Botpress automatically chunks and embeds them. The bot uses this to answer questions outside the defined flows.

4. Emulator
Test the bot directly in the browser with full debugging info (JSON payloads, NLU confidence scores).

Integration
One-click integrations for:
- WhatsApp, Telegram, Messenger, Slack, Webchat.

Botpress Cloud vs Self-Hosted
- v12 (Legacy): Fully open source, self-hosted.
- Cloud (New): Managed SaaS, generous free tier, built-in LLM (GPT-4) support.

AI Tasks
You can place "AI Task" cards in the flow.
- Input: "User feedback string"
- Instruction: "Extract the sentiment and summary."
- Output: Variables stored for the next step.

Botpress is powerful because it mixes Deterministic Flows (Rule-based) with Generative AI (LLM-based).