Book Image

Voicebot and Chatbot Design

By : Rachel Batish
Book Image

Voicebot and Chatbot Design

By: Rachel Batish

Overview of this book

We are entering the age of conversational interfaces, where we will interact with AI bots using chat and voice. But how do we create a good conversation? How do we design and build voicebots and chatbots that can carry successful conversations in in the real world? In this book, Rachel Batish introduces us to the world of conversational applications, bots and AI. You’ll discover how - with little technical knowledge - you can build successful and meaningful conversational UIs. You’ll find detailed guidance on how to build and deploy bots on the leading conversational platforms, including Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Facebook Messenger. You’ll then learn key design aspects for building conversational UIs that will really succeed and shine in front of humans. You’ll discover how your AI bots can become part of a meaningful conversation with humans, using techniques such as persona shaping, and tone analysis. For successful bots in the real world, you’ll explore important use-cases and examples where humans interact with bots. With examples across finance, travel, and e-commerce, you’ll see how you can create successful conversational UIs in any sector. Expand your horizons further as Rachel shares with you her insights into cutting-edge voicebot and chatbot technologies, and how the future might unfold. Join in right now and start building successful, high impact bots!
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Voicebot and Chatbot Design
Contributors
Preface
Other Book You May Enjoy
Index

Summary


Intelligent assistance, chatbots, voicebots, and voice-enabled devices, such as Amazon Echo and Google Home, have stormed into our lives, offering many ways to improve daily tasks, through natural human-computer communication. In fact, some of the applications that we use today already take advantage of voice/chat-enabled interaction to ease our lives. Whether we are turning the lights on and off in our living room with a simple voice command or shopping online with a Facebook Messenger bot, conversational UI makes our interactions more focused and efficient.

Fast-forward from today, we can assume that conversational UI, and more specifically voice-enabled communication, will replace all interactions with computers. In the movie Her (2013), written and directed by Spike Jonze, an unseen computer bot communicates with the main character using voice. This voicebot (played by Scarlett Johansson) assists, guides, and consults the main character on any possible matter. It is a personal assistant on steroids.

Its knowledge is unlimited, it continues to learn all the time, it can create a conversation (a true exchange of ideas), and at the end it can even understand feelings (however, it still doesn't feel itself). However, as we've seen above, with current technology, real-life conversational UI still lacks many of the components seen in Her and faces unsolved challenges and question marks around it. The experience is limited for the user, as it's still mostly un-contextual and bots are far from understanding feelings or social situations.

Nevertheless, with all the limitations we experience today, creating a supercomputer that knows everything is more within reach than creating a super-knowledgeable person. Technology, whether in the form of advanced AI, ML, or DL methodologies, will solve most of those challenges and make the progress needed to build successful bot assistants.

What might take a bit more time to transform is human skepticism: conversational UI is also limited because its users are still very skeptical of it. Aware of its limitations, we stick to what works best and tend to not challenge it too much. When comparing children-bot interaction with that of adults, it is clear to see that while the latter group stays within specific boundaries of usage, the former interacts with the bots as they are real adult humans – knowledgeable about almost everything. It might be a classic chicken or the egg dilemma, but one thing is for sure: the journey has started and there's no going back.