Services
Products
Portfolio
Blog
Contact

Lena Shakurova

Freelance Chatbot Developer & Conversation Designer

5+ years
as chatbot developer
Top Rated Plus
freelancer on Upwork
35+
happy clients

01.Hi,

I’m Lena, self-employed Chatbot Developer & Conversation Designer. I enjoy solving problems and see myself as a creative person who makes things happen. Chatbots, to me, are a great problem-solving tool that also offers great flexibility. Perhaps that’s why, even after more than 5 years of building chatbots, I still find it exciting.

Over the last years, I’ve worked with different kinds of businesses, handling everything from strategy to conversation design and development. There days, I work independently as a freelancer and also run a chatbot development agency. Together with another freelancer, we offer full-cycle chatbot development services, helping companies build chatbots that work. I use my experience in artificial intelligence, linguistics and business to build chatbots that solve problems and are also nice for your users to talk with.

If you need help with your chatbot project, you can send me an email or schedule a call directly to start a conversation.

Lena Shakurova, Chatbot Developer & NLP Engineer.

02.How I can help

Chatbot
development

Get a chatbot built with Rasa, DialogFlow or GPT-4

I offer end-to-end chatbot development services from scratch, handling everything from strategy to conversation design and implementation. I also offer ongoing support and team trainings to ensure a smooth project handover.

Book a free intro

Chatbot
consultation

Get your chatbot-related questions answered

If you alredy have a chatbot, I can review it and give you tips on how to improve your implementation or conversation design. Alternatively, I can help you understand how you can start with a chatbot project from scratch.

Book consultation (120$/h)

Workshops
& trainings

Learn to build chatbots with GPT4, DialogFlow, Rasa

During a workshop you will learn the basics of chatbot development and under my guidance build a simple chatbot using GPT4, DialogFlow or Rasa. You can also invite me as a speaker to your event, with a custom-made workshop.

Learn about workshops

04.Tools I use

Chatbots
Python
Rasa
DialogFlow
GPT-4
ManyChat
LandBot
NLP
SpaCy
NLTK
Gensim
Sklearn
TensorFlow
Web
HTML
CSS
JavaScript
Flask
Scrapy
Django
Data bases
BigQuery
MySQL
MongoDB
PostgreSQL
SQLite
Data annotation
HumanFirst
RasaX
Prodigy
Tagtog

05.Where I worked

  • Pars Labs
  • Similar.ai
  • Spok
  • COIN
  • Textkernel
  • United Wardrobe
Chatbot Developer & Founder @Pars Labs2018 - presentPars Labs is my chatbot development agency where together with another freelancer I help companies solve problems using chatbots. Here is what I do:
  • Design and develop chatbots from scratch using GPT-4, Rasa, DialogFlow and other tools
  • Provide consultations on chatbot development and conversation design
  • Give workshops and training sessions
Chatbot Developer & Founder @Pars Labs2018 - presentPars Labs is my chatbot development agency where together with another freelancer I help companies solve problems using chatbots. Here is what I do:
  • Design and develop chatbots from scratch using GPT-4, Rasa, DialogFlow and other tools
  • Provide consultations on chatbot development and conversation design
  • Give workshops and training sessions
Full-stack developer @Similar.ai2020 — 2022Developing SEO platform helping big marketplace companies rank higher on Google.
  • Building new features for any part of the product
  • Taking care of new customer implementations
  • Writing crawlers
  • Building ML models
  • Adding new features to the UI
  • Creating data analytics reports in Google Data Studio
Chatbot Developer & Co-founder @SpokDecember 2019 — February 2021Building a language-learning chatbot that helps English learners practice their speaking skills.
  • Designed the chatbot from scratch
  • Set up the project architecture and implemented it using Rasa
  • Was labelling the data and training the assistant
  • Was adding new features and iteratively improving the chatbot
Freelance Chatbot Developer & NLP Architect @COIN2019Working in a team as an NLP Architect Chatbot expert building a financial chatbot assistant.
  • Re-architectured the chatbot
  • Worked on developing a strategy for expanding the chatbot to new languages and new communication platforms
  • Improved the chatbot development workflow
  • Was managing the team and guiding the chatbot development process
NLP Research Engineer @Textkernel2018 — 2019Working in a document understanding team, doing research and development on multilingual CV parsing for low-resource languages.
  • Developed a universal Slavic CV parsing pipeline for 5 languages, using transfer learning and cross-lingual embeddings
  • Created new intrinsic metrics for evaluating the quality of cross-lingual word embeddings
  • Improved error analysis work flow
  • Presented at two conferences and published a paper
Freelance Chatbot Developer @United Wardrobe2018Worked closely with customer support team to develop a prototype of a Dutch-speaking customer support chatbot in DialogFlow.
  • Helped design conversation flow
  • Implemented proof of concept in DialogFlow

What I've built

GPT4 & DialogFlow

Business Assistant

Business Assistant helps answer questions of my potential clients about my skills, work experience and the services I offer. It helps me to save time on answering the same questions over and over again.

Learn more →

Rasa & Python

Language Assistant

Language Assistant helps beginners to improve their English while speaking. The chatbot can understand spoken language, correct grammar errors and talk about a topics like food, family, hobbies.

Learn more →

Manychat

Chatbot Recruiter

Chatbot Recruiter gathers information about potential candidates, filters it out, automatically schedules an appointment via Calendly and saves prospect information to a Google Spreadsheet.

Learn more →

DialogFlow

Financial Assistant

Financial Assistant helps users buy, exchange and send crypto, gives information about user’s wallet as well as answers common questions about different cryptocurrencies.

Learn more →

Rasa & Python

Property Assistant

Property Assistant helps manage rental properties and answer questions coming from potential tenants. The chatbot can show available apartments and give information about the rent, fees, policies e.t.c.

Learn more →

06.Where I studied

M.S.
Artificial Intelligence, Radboud University (2017-2019)

Courses I took: Text Mining • Statistical Machine Learning • Trends in AI • Computer Assisted Language Learning • Information Retrieval • Second Language Acquisition 


Final project: As my master project, I developed cross-lingual CV parsing model and wrote a research paper describing ways to obtain cross-lingual domain-specific word embeddings.

B.S.
Computational Linguistics, Higher School of Economics (2013-2017)

Courses I took: Discrete Mathematics • Python programming • Linear Algebra and Mathematical Analysis • R Programming • Theory of Algorithms • Automatic Natural Language Processing • Databases • Information Retrieval • Neurolinguistics 


Final project: As my bachelor project, I developed a web app that automatically generates language tests for practising Russian.

07.Talks & Papers

Talks
PyData Amsterdam 2019: «How to expand your NLP solution to new languages using tranfer learning»
Watch on YouTube
Talks
CLIN29 conference 2019: «Best practices for learning domain specific cross-lingual embeddings»
Read abstract
Paper
ACL 2019: «Best practices for learning domain specific cross-lingual embeddings»
Read abstract

FAQs

Which tools do you use for chatbot development?
I work with GPT4, Rasa and DialogFlow, ManyChat, Landbot VoiceFlow and other chatbot development platforms. I choose the best tool for each project based on the client’s needs and the project requirements.
We are just starting, can you help us build a chatbot from scratch?
Yes, I offer full-cycle chatbot development services, from idea to production. I help with project planning, conversation design, chatbot development and integration of a chatbot widget with your website or connecting your chatbot with WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger or another social media of your choice.
We already have a chatbot but it's not properly working, can you help?
Sure, I can help you improve your existing chatbot. There are two most common reasons why chatbots don’t work: either your conversation design is suboptimal or you trained your machine learning models wrong. I can help you review both your conversation design and training data and give you tips on how to improve your chatbot.
What makes you different from other chatbot developers?
Well, there are a few things. Firstly, I am not just a software developer who builds chatbots, I specialise in chatbot development and conversation design. I’ve actually studied linguistics and language theory which helps me understand how language works and design user-friendly conversations. I also studied artificial intelligence so I understand how machine learning models work under the hood and can train chatbots that actually work. Plus, in my work I really focus on trying to understand the business of my client and the processes that are currently in place to offer a solution to actual problems.
What's the difference between working with you as an agency v.s. freelancer?
I work together with other freelancers, and as an agency we offer full-cycle chatbot development services. As an independent freelancer, I have a limited availability and I’m available for consultations, strategy, project planning and workshops & trainings. My availability depends on the amount of projects I am working on, I’d be happy to get a message from you and see how I can help your business grow.
We are curious to learn more about how you work, how do we get in touch?
You can use the contact form below, send me an email to lena@shakurova.io or schedule a call with me directly using my calendly link https://calendly.com/lena-shakurova.
You can also contact me using this contact form
Location:Amsterdam, Netherlands
Copyright © 2021 All rights reserved
Let’s start a conversation