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)

Basic building blocks

Before we move on to build our bot, let's look at the basic building blocks:

  • Blocks
  • Cards
  • Buttons
  • Plugins
  • Attributes

Blocks

Go back to the editor and look at the Bot Structure tab. Under Bot Structure, you will find two types of blocks—built-in and user-defined. Welcome message and Default answer are the two built-in blocks. We will be building user-defined blocks to implement the conversation capability of the chatbot. Each block can be thought of as a response segment of the chatbot. Each block can contain one or more cards.

Cards

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