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)

MS Bot Framework

MS Bot Framework is a Microsoft product for chatbot development. It houses three products: Bot Builder SDK, Bot Framework Portal, and channels. Bot Builder SDK is the toolkit for building chatbots. It has libraries of classes and code that represent various elements of a conversation. These can be used in our development process to build chatbots at a faster pace than building them from scratch. The Bot Framework Portal is used to register the bot in order to manage it efficiently and there is a host of tools for analytics and diagnostics that can be used on this portal. Finally, the framework provides a unified approach to integrating with several channels.

There are a huge number of channels that you can integrate your bot with, including Skype, Facebook Messenger, Kik, Telegram, Slack, MS Teams, and Twilio. You can also create a web chat client using the portal...