Chatbots are software applications used for online chat conversations through text or text-to-speech instead of providing direct contact with a live human agent. Chatbots are used in dialog systems for various purposes, including customer service, request routing, or information gathering. This course begins with a brief overview of chatbots, their need, and the types of chatbots. We will explore rule-based versus self-learning chatbots. We will understand the working mechanism of chatbots. We will explore machine learning-based chatbots and understand the ML-based architecture of chatbots. You will learn about the purpose of ML-based chatbots and their impact. We will get an overview of the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK). You will learn to install packages and create a corpus with Python. We will delve into text preprocessing and helper function deployment, generate responses, and implement term-frequency times inverse document-frequency. We will train and test rule-based chatbots and finally work on a project developing an artificial intelligence question-answer chatbot using NLTK. Upon course completion, you will be able to relate the concepts and theories for chatbots in various domains, understand and implement machine learning models for building real-time chatbots, and evaluate machine learning models in chatbots. All resources are available at: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Basics-of-Chatbots-with-Machine-Learning-Python