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

Brilliant! I hope you had a great time exploring and building a transport chatbot providing useful information on trains to users. Besides building the chatbot, we also explored the use of Twilio communication APIs to expose the chatbot over the SMS platform. I hope you tried to chat with your bot over SMS and realized how easy it is to get useful information without internet data. We did explore a few conversational tasks and also got to implement a couple. However, you could move on to more complex tasks, such as journey planning, based on the chatbot model that we built in this chapter. 

We also learned how to enable the chatbot to process natural language utterances from the user by building a Dialogflow agent and plugging it into the SMS chatbot. This is a trick you can use while building chatbots for other platforms too. You might now realize that there are...