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

The FB Messenger stack


In Chapter 1, Conversational UI is our Future, we outlined the building blocks of conversational applications, focusing on speech recognition for voicebots, which is less relevant in the FB Messenger use case, and the need for a strong NLU component to understand the user's intent. The NLU, as we defined, fulfills the task of reading comprehension. The computer reads the text and then tries to grasp the user's intent behind it.

To accomplish this capability, in 2015, FB acquired Wit.ai, which is a speech recognition and natural language processing service. While originally, the goal was to take advantage of the voice recognition capabilities and voice interface APIs of Wit.ai, it ended up becoming the NLU engine of FB Messenger, improving the understanding level of bots within the Messenger platform.

Building a FB Messenger bot using Wit.ai

For this example, we will provide the user with a way to order this book. This is very similar to the process we followed on the...