Book Image

Hands-On Chatbots and Conversational UI Development

By : Srini Janarthanam
Book Image

Hands-On Chatbots and Conversational UI Development

By: Srini Janarthanam

Overview of this book

Conversation as an interface is the best way for machines to interact with us using the universally accepted human tool that is language. Chatbots and voice user interfaces are two flavors of conversational UIs. Chatbots are real-time, data-driven answer engines that talk in natural language and are context-aware. Voice user interfaces are driven by voice and can understand and respond to users using speech. This book covers both types of conversational UIs by leveraging APIs from multiple platforms. We'll take a project-based approach to understand how these UIs are built and the best use cases for deploying them. We'll start by building a simple messaging bot from the Facebook Messenger API to understand the basics of bot building. Then we move on to creating a Task model that can perform complex tasks such as ordering and planning events with the newly-acquired-by-Google Dialogflow and Microsoft Bot framework. We then turn to voice-enabled UIs that are capable of interacting with users using speech with Amazon Alexa and Google Home. By the end of the book, you will have created your own line of chatbots and voice UIs for multiple leading platforms.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Broadcasting

Another interesting feature provided by Chatfuel is the ability send messages to more than one user at any time. This is a facility that you can use to restart conversations with the user or send notifications periodically. To use this feature, click the Broadcast option in the main menu:

You will see four options. Let's select DELIVER YOUR MESSAGE NOW. There are three things to do—compose a message to send, choose users, and hit SEND:

Click USER FILTER to choose a subset of users you want to send the message to. This is done using variables and values. For instance, you can choose to send the message to all users who said that they love Indian cuisine (that is, {{restaurant_cuisine}} = 'Indian') and that they are in the Old Town ({{restaurant_location}} = 'Old town'). This a message can be a discount offer at an Indian...