How to create a button based chatbot - ionic-framework

Question

I am currently working on a project that involves creating a "chatbot". It's not going to be any kind of "AI", deep learning or anything fancy like that. It's going to be a "menu/button based chatbot" (As they call it around on the web). I have no idea how to tackle this kind of functionality. It's going to be inside an app, I will be using Ionic and the "database" will be stored on firebase as a JSON (however I am open to use something else if its easier).
When communicating with the chatbot, the user will only be able to use closed answer, mainly 1,2,3 or 4 responses. Each responses will lead to the next question and so on.
We then have to create a structure of all the different possibilities.
Let's say the chatbot starts by asking "What do you want to eat for dinner ? " and the user has 2 choices: pasta, pizza. Then, depending of the user's anwser, we then display the next question. So the user has a very limited range of answer but we need to catter for every path.
What I am thinking so far is having a JSON config with blocks like this:
{
address: 0001,
type: 1, // The type will probably help to identify the kind of block
question: 'What do you want to eat for dinner?',
responses : [{
title: "pasta",
link: 0002,
}, {
title: "pizza",
link: 0003,
}
},
{
address: 0002,
type: 1,
question: 'Great you want to eat some pasta, what else?',
responses : [{
title: "Cheese",
link: 0004,
}, {
title: "Cake",
link: 0005,
}
}, etc.
So when the user clicks on "pasta", I should display the next block (which is the one with the address 0002). I could have different block types, ones that will display text question, others that will just display a video in the chat or any other kind. (so blocks might be more complex with video url, images etc.)
I am thinking of creating a very basic tool that will helps to create all the different blocks that will then generate the massive JSON config.
But this have two downsides :
-> I need to define one block for each interactions. (This will lead in having hundreds of blocks if the chatbot becomes big)
-> Let's say I want to offer something a bit more personalised and I need to use some data stored outside of the chatbot (on the user profile for example).
Let's say the user has specified if he is or is not allergic to cheese.
pizza->cheese (he is allergic)-> go to 'you should avoid cheese'
pizza->cheese (he is not allergic)-> go to 'great, what do you want for dessert?'
But in my model, cheese always go to address 0004, so this is not going to work. I need the block to have some "rules" about where to go next depending of some variables, but this seems to be tricky...
I am open to use any kind of API, I've seen tons but not something I can easily integrate in Ionic. I want to have some control on the design and I would like to avoid being dependent of an external solution, but still I am curious if anything can fit my needs.

Answer 1

I would take a look at Watson Assistant and look at the different kinds of responses you can implement.
The above image is what adding an option response would look like similar to the example JSON you posted.
It might be too much in some cases, but having a framework to handle some of the dialog node traversals is quite handy.