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)

Conversational tasks

Let's first figure out the tasks that we want the chatbot to perform. I would think that a chatbot capable of talking about the weather should be able to do it along the following lines:

  • Weather now
  • Weather today
  • Weather this week
  • Weather this weekend
  • Weather in the future

All the mentioned reports are based on a geographical location. This piece of information could be provided in many formats. Most people would provide a city/town name, or a ZIP code. But given the fact that mobile devices have GPS capability, and messaging apps allow for location sharing, another way of locating the user could be using LatLong (latitude and longitude) coordinates. Let's account for all these variations. In addition to these tasks and input types, we need to consider requests for clarifications that the chatbot must be capable of if the input location information...