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.

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Table of Contents (11 chapters)
Preface
Preface
What this book covers
What you need for this book
Who this book is for
Conventions
Reader feedback
Customer support
Free Chapter
1
Introduction
Introduction
Conversational user interfaces
Developer's toolkit
Benefits
Chatbots are here to stay
Lets get started!
2
Tour Guide for Your City
Tour Guide for Your City
Getting started
Building your first bot
Basic building blocks
Default blocks
Next steps
More cards
Navigation
Managing context
Understanding natural language
Backend processing
Broadcasting
Bot templates
Analytics
Summary
References
3
Let's Talk Weather
Let's Talk Weather
Conversational tasks
Conversational design
Backend tasks
Implementing the chatbot
Creating a chatbot web service
Publishing on Facebook Messenger
More Facebook message formats
Summary
References
4
Building a Persona Bot
Building a Persona Bot
Introducing Dialogflow
Summary
References
5
Let's Catch a Train
Let's Catch a Train
Exploring Transport API
Conversational design
Building a simple SMS bot
Building a two-way chatbot
Summary
References
6
Restaurant Search
Restaurant Search
MS Bot Framework
Building a bot
Getting started with Zomato
Restaurant search bot
Connecting to Skype
Summary
References
7
The News Bot
The News Bot
Getting started with the Twitter app
Building your first Twitter bot
Exploring the Twitter SDK
Exploring a news data service
Building a Twitter news bot
Building a personalized news bot
Summary
References
8
My TV Guide
My TV Guide
Amazon Alexa
Warming up with a quotes bot
My TV guide
Built-in intents and slot types
Summary
References
9
My Man Friday
My Man Friday
Todoist
Building an action
Summary
Conclusion
References
10
More Resources
More Resources
Articles
List of conferences
List of magazines
Groups on social media

Getting started

Let's get started. To create an account with Chatfuel, go to https://chatfuel.com: 

Click GET STARTED FOR FREE. Remember, the Chatfuel toolkit is currently free to use. This will lead you to one of the following two options:

  • If you are logged into Facebook, it will ask for permission to link your Chatfuel account to your Facebook account
  • If you are not logged in, it will ask you to log into Facebook first before asking for permission

Chatfuel links to Facebook to deploy bots. So it requires permission to use your Facebook account:

Authorize Chatfuel to receive information about you and to be your Pages manager:

That's it! You are all set to build your very first bot:

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