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)

Understanding natural language

So far, we have seen how the conversational flow happens using buttons. In each case, the user has to press a button or type in information to fill in a slot, which makes the conversation progress. However, it is possible to have users initiate conversation and navigate using natural language (NL) input as well in Chatfuel. In this section, we will explore how to make the chatbot understand the user's natural language inputs and take action.

Default block

Alongside the Welcome message block, there is a Default answer block. This block is used by the chatbot as response to any input from the user that it does not understand. Go ahead and change the contents of the block as follows:

Now test...