This week I continued making progress on my chatbot and finally figured out how to link blocks. As I mentioned in my feedback post, I decided to scrap the smoking and eating junk food habits to focus primarily on procrastination, which meant I had to work backwards a little bit since I had already created a few blocks which served to help people decide which habit of the three they wanted to work on alleviating.

                  Though I’ve been making some good headway with respect to the dialogue entries, something I’ve realized in terms of presenting the chatbot both during the midway mark and the final presentation is that as an mvp, it would have to convey multiple day’s worth of dialogue within a single demonstration. I’m still wrestling with the implications that this will have on demo day, since the conversation won’t feel as fluid if someone is getting continuously spammed by a chatbot because its in a presentation. For instance, in order to display that Winspire takes preventative measures against procrastination in the moment, I’ll have to manually send a message along the lines of “hey, you’ve been on FB for 10 minutes, is there anything you can do for yourself now instead of FB to help your future self?” right then and there, even if it doesn’t make contextual sense. Therefore, in building out my mvp, I’m thinking of creating a group of blocks that I will manually control, as well as an automated group that respond in sequence based on user input.

                  In the long run, the goal is of course to automate the entirety of the chatbot, with perhaps the only manual input on my part being uploading new content every now and then and sending broadcasts that would reach multiple users in one swoop. To that end, I’ll need to consider how I can move my project along from demo day to its final form, from a single interaction with a bot to a more continuous and hopefully perpetuated level of engagement.

                  In addition to these contemplations, one of the things I really want to figure out is whether or not the platform I’m using (Chatfuel) has the ability to recognize how long someone has been on Facebook/Messenger, since that’s one of the primary ways that I intend on discerning whether or not someone is procrastinating, in which case I’ll shoot them a quick message that encourages them to deviate from their current behavior and actually do their work.