Sintbot: Sinterklaas's digital helper!

Look, there comes the steamboat! Saturday 13 November is the moment many a child, retail worker and marketer has been waiting for: Sinterklaas moors in the Netherlands again! His digital colleague has made the necessary preparations too: Watermelon's Sintbot is ready and waiting. Our Sintbot helps Sinterklaas answer questions about the Sinterklaas celebration. In this article we give you all the ins and outs of the success of our digital helper for Sinterklaas!

What is the Sintbot?

To show the versatility of the conversational AI chatbot, we brought the Sintbot into being. The Sintbot is a chatbot that answers frequently asked questions from children (and their parents) about the Sinterklaas celebration. Think of questions such as: “when is Sinterklaas's birthday?” or “how old is Sinterklaas?”. The chatbot runs on artificial intelligence, which means it learns to understand word combinations itself and can answer more and more questions independently. Since going live, the Sintbot has held 3,500 conversations!

How was this Sinterklaas chatbot built?

The Sintbot was created in roughly four steps. Below we take you briefly through the process of building the chatbot:

Step 1: Collecting frequently asked questions

Before we could start building the Sintbot, we researched the questions children frequently ask about Sinterklaas. For this we looked into common search terms on Google and spoke to parents of children. And what emerged? The questions children ask most are: “Is Sinterklaas real?”, “how old is Sinterklaas?” and “why does Sinterklaas wear a mitre?”. We collected all these frequently asked questions in a single list.

Step 2: The personality of the chatbot

In building the Sintbot we then looked at the personality of the chatbot. The Sintbot is Sinterklaas's digital helper, so its language had to match. We decided the Sintbot speaks politely, just like the good saint himself, and makes the occasional joke. We also thought it made sense for a digital Sinterklaas to use emoji. We had to bear in mind as well that most chatters are between 5 and 14 years old, and the language has to be understandable for those children. The Sintbot's face is very important too: we transformed our current chatbot icon into a virtual Sinterklaas!

Step 3: Drawing up answers

Once we had given the digital Sinterklaas a face and a personality, it was time to gather the answers. For this we of course first had to research the history of Sinterklaas. Where does the Sinterklaas story come from? Why does he wear a mitre? And does he have a wife? Every answer to a question is written in the Sintbot's own tone of voice and added to the Watermelon platform.

Step 4: Keeping track of mismatches

Once the personality and the questions and answers have been added to the chatbot, you can really start testing. By putting the chatbot live, it gets steadily smarter. That is how we discovered that plenty of questions are asked about the Sinterklaasjournaal as well, such as: “Who presents the Sinterklaasjournaal this year?”. We added those questions later, so that the Sintbot could answer them too. Every year we make optimisations to keep making the Sintbot smarter, so the bot can respond to every child online.

What challenges does the Sintbot face?

We also see that some children use the chatbot for the wrong purposes. Many children test the chatbot with swear words or shocking statements, to see how the bot reacts. We try to teach the children that this kind of language is not on with a chatbot either.

Alongside this, we update the chatbot with accurate data every year. We are often asked, for example, when Sinterklaas arrives in the Netherlands. That date is of course different every year. The chatbot's answers have to be reviewed annually and we adjust the data accordingly.

Want to know more?

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