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Hands-On Chatbots and Conversational UI Development

By : Janarthanam

4.5 (4)

Buy this Book

Hands-On Chatbots and Conversational UI Development

4.5 (4)

By: Janarthanam

Buy this Book

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.

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Free Chapter

Introduction

Conversational user interfaces

Developer's toolkit

Benefits

Chatbots are here to stay

Lets get started!

Tour Guide for Your City

Getting started

Building your first bot

Basic building blocks

Default blocks

Next steps

More cards

Navigation

Managing context

Understanding natural language

Backend processing

Broadcasting

Bot templates

Analytics

Summary

References

Let's Talk Weather

Conversational tasks

Conversational design

Backend tasks

Implementing the chatbot

Creating a chatbot web service

Publishing on Facebook Messenger

More Facebook message formats

Summary

References

Building a Persona Bot

Introducing Dialogflow

Summary

References

Let's Catch a Train

Exploring Transport API

Conversational design

Building a simple SMS bot

Building a two-way chatbot

Summary

References

Restaurant Search

MS Bot Framework

Building a bot

Getting started with Zomato

Restaurant search bot

Connecting to Skype

Summary

References

The News Bot

Getting started with the Twitter app

Building your first Twitter bot

Exploring the Twitter SDK

Exploring a news data service

Building a Twitter news bot

Building a personalized news bot

Summary

References

My TV Guide

Amazon Alexa

Warming up with a quotes bot

My TV guide

Built-in intents and slot types

Summary

References

My Man Friday

Todoist

Building an action

Summary

Conclusion

References

More Resources

Articles

List of conferences

List of magazines

Groups on social media

Customer Reviews

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Summary

Hurray! You have built your very own conversational Twitter bot. I would strongly recommend that you take this further and explore other kinds of conversation that you can possibly have with the bot. How about having the bot search and retweet hashtags automatically for you? How would you use metrics, such as retweet counts, follower numbers, and like counts, to qualify a tweet for retweeting? Explore these questions to build better and more useful Twitter bots.

In this chapter, we have covered a lot. We started off with the Twitter API and got a taste of how we can automatically tweet, retweet, and search for tweets using hashtags. We then explored a News source API that provides news articles from about 70 different newspapers. We integrated it with our Twitter bot to create a new tweeting bot. We explored how to personalize it for users by using user interest...