Posting at the direct suggestion of the author of the article (just to clarify I'm not trying to comment hijack), we (www.converse.ai) have solved a good deal o

Posting at the direct suggestion of the author of the article (just to clarify I'm not trying to comment hijack), we (www.converse.ai) have solved a good deal of these problems, and are making it available as a platform for companies to build their own conversational services on. We handle: 1) Front end integrations (Slack, Twitter, Intercom, Telegram etc, more to come) 2, Natural language interaction (either via our own NLP system or pluggable into other NLP systems as required) 3, Conversation state and context management 4, Validation and parsing of conversation input based on NLP, Regex, or external functions (e.g calling another API) as required. (NLP isn't best in all scenarios) 5, Static and Dynamic 'Conversation Maps', allowing you to generate them on the fly as required. Comments/Questions etc welcome :)