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)

Summary

Congratulations! In this chapter, we embarked on a journey toward building awesome chatbots. I hope, using Chatfuel, you have created your very first bot. Using tour guiding as the use case, we explored a variety of chatbot design and development topics along the way—conversation flow design, blocks, types of message content, navigating through the conversational flow, understanding basic natural language utterances, and many more. We have also learned the various building blocks provided by Chatfuel to build, monitor, and manage chatbots. 

In the following chapters, we will explore using a variety of other use cases and more advanced topics in building chatbots, such as understanding nuances in natural language utterances and managing more complex conversational contexts.