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)

Next steps

Now that we have brushed up on the basics, let's start building our bot: 

  1. On the welcome block, click the default text and edit it.  Hovering the mouse around the block can reveal options such as deleting the card, rearranging the order of the cards, and adding new cards between existing cards. Delete the Main menu button:
  1. Add a Text card. Let's add a follow-up text card and ask the user a question. 
  2. Add buttons for user responses. Click ADD BUTTON and type in the name of the button. Ignore block names for now. Since they are incomplete, they will appear in red. Remember, you can add up to three buttons to a text card:
  1. Button responses need to be tied to blocks so that when users hit a button the chatbot would know what to do or say. Let's add a few blocks. To add a new block, click ADD BLOCK in the Bot Structure...