No! Not a daft question at all!
I’ll try to answer these one at a time (and contain my ambition for the project).
“What kind of chatbot framework will it be?”
Think Rails for Chatbots. An opinionated framework that favors convention over configuration. It emerged from a project we built last year. We realized that MVC doesn’t fit the application requirements of a chatbot. In the process of developing an alternative, we realized the most intuitive architecture for a cognitive agent would necessarily mirror our own cognitive processes. (Executive Coordination, Fast Thinking, Slow Thinking).
“What will it enable you to do?”
I’m hoping by September you’ll be able to scaffold chatbots for a number of platforms in minutes. Ideally you’ll be able to manage any number of “personalities” in a single repository. We will also have NLP Clients readily accessible either via Hex Package or natively to the framework.
And, I’d love to hear what other people WANT (or expect) in a chatbot framework.