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 design

Now that we have a good idea of the data we have in our hands, let's brainstorm the conversational tasks for our chatbot.

  • Nearest station
  • Next train
  • Time of arrival
  • Later trains from a station
  • How do I get from A to B?

Let's start with a simple one: getting to the nearest station.

Nearest station

In order to get to the nearest station for a user, we need his/her location. This could be in the form of postcode or latLon coordinates. Platforms such as Facebook Messenger allow users to share location in the form of latLon coordinates. However, since we are going to be using the SMS platform, let's use the postcode route. The conversation for this task could go in one of the following ways...