Proposal: Create facade bot to choose right chat to ask question

[dector]

Simple usage:

• Users can add the bot that will help them to choose right chat to ask questions.

Advanced usage (not for the first version):

• Users can ask questions to the bot and answer will be retrieved (if exists) from some knowledge database (might be useful in cases when people don't read FAQs).
• Users can ask questions to the bot and if answer doesn't exist in knowledge database - we can try to make a guess (hello heuristics or NLP 😄 ) if this question is offtopic or recommend the best channel where the question belongs to.

[r4zzz4k]

Let's clarify this a bit.

1. How exactly should the bot provide user with response? Do we use some automated solution? If so, how? Many questions don't contain any keywords. Should we reditect to default @kotlin_lang? Sounds like not that user-friendly in case someone redirects the question manually after that. We can probably try separate chat with volunteers, thought this might cause long waiting for user.

2. How do we push people to ask questions via this bot? As discussed elsewhere, bot cannot initiate chat with person. So we either post welcome message for every newcomer asking to start the dialog with the bot, which would bother everyone in the chat. Or we can leave reference in chat descriptions and everyone would ignore it and ask as-is.

[dector]

@r4zzz4k Good questions, thanks.

How exactly should the bot provide user with response?
How do we push people to ask questions via this bot?

I guess for now we can only try to ask folks to use bot when they are looking for some answer. I totally agree that the chances that this approach has lots of flaws but it would be nice to have simple and dirty solution to verify initial hypothesis.

[r4zzz4k]

I'm afraid asking to post questions via bot would get tons of negative feedback from users. This feels quite an alienating experience for Telegram, so unless organic way of pushing to DM with bot exists, it would probably be more logical to move discussions post factum as you're suggesting in #18.

[dector]

@r4zzz4k Yup, it's true. I guess for now bot might be used as a recommended option to (possibly) get fast answer.