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)

Building a simple SMS bot

Let's now build the SMS platform interface for the chatbot. To bear with the complexity, let us do this in two steps. First, let us build a bot to simply send SMS text messages to a mobile number. This could be a message concerning the status of a train arriving at a station or the next train to a certain destination from a given station. Second, we will build a two-way chatbot that can receive messages from users and respond to them appropriately. To do this, we will use a service called Twilio. Twilio is a developer platform for communications enabling developers to add messaging, voice, and video capabilities to their software. We will explore how we can build notification bots and chatbots using Twilio's messaging infrastructure.

Getting started...