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)

My Man Friday

Now that we are in the last chapter of the book, let's do something really interesting. How about we build a bot that acts as your very own man Friday. Imagine asking the bot to do tasks such as organizing your to-do list, reminding you of tasks and meetings, and so on. In the last chapter, we developed an Alexa skill to browse through the TV programs for the day. In this chapter, we will explore the process of building skills on Google Assistant. Google Assistant is Google's offering of a personal assistance chatbot like iPhone's Siri and Amazon's Alexa. You can interact with Google Assistant on a variety of channels such as Allo mobile app, Allo for web, and Google Home. 

Google Home is a smart speaker similar to Amazon Echo and is powered by Google Assistant. In other words, Google Home is the embodiment in which Assistant lives....