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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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2 star

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Amazon Alexa

Amazon Alexa has its own development platform that allows developers to teach it new skills. Skills are nothing but conversational capabilities that can be custom-built into Alexa using a combination of Amazon's toolkit with our own. You do not actually need the Amazon Echo smart speaker to get started, but it would be great if you had one. Amazon Echo comes in three sizes: Amazon Echo, Amazon Echo Dot, and Amazon Echo Show. Echo Dot is the most basic version and is priced at £49 at the time of writing. This would suffice for a developer to develop and test custom-developed skills:

Source:Amazon.co.uk

The Alexa ecosystem also includes a skill store where custom skills can be published. Published skills can be browsed and installed on your Alexa, thereby adding to Alexa's skill set. This can be done either on Alexa's companion website...