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)

Exploring a news data service

Let's now build a bot that will tweet news articles to its followers at regular intervals. We will then extend it to be personalized by users through a conversation that happens over direct messaging with the bot. In order to build a news bot, we need a source where we can get news articles. We are going to explore a news service called NewsAPI.org in this section. NewsAPI is a service that aggregates news articles from roughly 70 newspapers around the globe. 

Setting up NewsAPI

Let us set up an account with the NewsAPI data service and get the API key:

  1. Go to newsapi.org:
  1. Click Get API key.
  2. Register using your email.
  3. Get your API key.
  1. Explore the sources: https://newsapi.org...