I'm looking for a service or product, local or cloud provided, free or commercial that allows to create and run the equivalent of a chat-bot but on emails.
More formally I'm looking for a software that supports me in creating conversational agents that automates email responses in order to, either:
- provide the needed answer to the person that sent the initial email
- answer with an email containing additional questions, in order to gather more information and, eventually, provide the needed answer
This kind of application is becoming fairly popular on the instant message channels, and they rely on a state machine that guides the conversation using a script. The main algorithm is more or less this:
- The bot starts from an initial state
- Based on the current state, the program sends a text message to the user and waits for an answer
- The user answer is segmented with NLP techniques to select which transition to follow, and a new state is reached
- If the final state has been reached the program terminates, otherwise go to step (2)
There is a good choice of these applications/services for the instant messaging channel, but I cannot find any for automating email dialogs.
EDIT: I found this: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/bot-framework/channel-connect-email but it seems to me like a chat-bot used on email systems, and not something purposely designed for the email channel.
