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)

Getting started with the Twitter app

To get started, let us explore the Twitter developer platform. Let us begin by building a Twitter app and later explore how we can tweet news articles to followers based on their interests:

  1. Log on to Twitter at www.twitter.com. If you don't have an account on Twitter, create one.
  2. Go to https://apps.twitter.com/, which is Twitter's application management dashboard.
  3. Click the Create New App button:
  1. Create an application by filling in the form providing name, description, and a website (fully-qualified URL). Read and agree to the Developer Agreement and hit Create your Twitter application:
  1. You will now see your application dashboard. Explore the tabs:
  1. Click Keys and Access Tokens
  1. Copy consumer key and consumer secret and hang on to them.
  2. Scroll down to Your Access Token:
  1. Click Create my access...