Botflix
A chatbot that recommends movies on the basis of user’s personality type using Myers Briggs type indicators.
Project / Team
Academic Project for Design of Smart Systems, Fall 2019 with Saumya Sharma
Role / Tools
Intent Planning Conversation Design using Google DialogFlow API
Timeline
October 2019 (2 Weeks)
Problem
Joe is bored at home on a cold Sunday evening. She is in a happy mood and wants to watch a movie. Yay!
She looks up for movie recommendations on Netflix. After minutes of failed search and not finding anything of her interest, she is pissed.
She is reminded of BotFlix, as suggested by her friend. She installs BotFlix and waits for the magic to happen!
Just like Joe, most of us spend minutes on Netflix but are unable to find that perfect movie for ourselves. We get suggestions based on the previously watched movies, selected genre, popularity and affinity groups. And sometimes, we just find ourselves lost in this paradox of choice.
This is a bummer especially when we are craving a good watch and that’s the challenge we tackled with Botflix - a chatbot that recommends movies on the basis of users’ personality type using Myers Briggs type indicators.
About BotFlix
BotFlix is a chatbot that recommends movies on the basis of users’ personality type using Myers Briggs type indicators. The bot asks four questions in total and categorises users in each of these indicators.
It dives deep into users’ psyche to understand the kind of movies they would like to watch on the basis of these questions.
Project Goals
Attempt to understand user personality to find movies, characters and themes that they can best relate to through platforms like IMDB, Netflix, Prime Video, etc
Facilitate an easy flow of conversation
Ease user frustration and confusion while deciding which movie to watch
Deal with the paradox of choice on streaming apps such as Netflix
Establish a unique movie-recommendation system
Deliver a personalised experience to users looking for for variation in movies.
How It Works
Process Flow
Intent Planning
The design of the chat works around planning intents and follow up intents for each category based on the process flow.
Each intent is followed by a response from the bot in form of the questionnaire. The planning of these questionnaire was based out of literature research. We first planned out our primary intents in four broader categories:
Category 01
Allowing the users to ask about BotFlix’s background and engaging in small talk (example: Tell me about yourself, I am bored, Tell me a joke, etc.)
Category 02
Asking varied questions to users for each indicator category and providing them with the prompts so that the users’ replies match the training phrases. Providing users with three movie recommendations based on their detected personality types.
Category 03
Asking the users to start afresh if their reply don’t match the training data.
Category 04
Allowing the user to give feedback on the recommendations and provide with more suggestions or end the conversation.
Question Planning
Deciding on the kinds of questions to ask played a major in the design process.
The questions were choice based to categorise the users in each of the subgroups as discussed before. We wanted them to be related to users’ daily lives and out-of-movie context.
We performed literature review on Myer Briggs personality types to get deep insights about how the characteristics, preferences and decision-making process of different personalities, and formulated our questions based on those contexts.
Following are the examples of our questions based on subgroups:
Introversion or Extroversion
Do you spend your weekends staying cozy in bed or partying with friends?
Sensing or Intuition
How do you solve problems: rely on facts or explore different possibilities?
Feeling or Thinking
Do you generally plan your vacations or like to be spontaneous?
Perceiving and Judging
Do you like to work in organised spaces or flexible spaces?
Working Prototype
Next Steps
The recommendations can be enhanced by building a database of movies over time and improve the variety of recommendations provided
Links to movies on different streaming channels can be added
Immense future possibilities for Botflix by developing a nuanced personalised questionnaire and training data
Deploy on platforms such as Netflix, Youtube, Prime Video, and smart TV’s application.