Hands-on chatbots and conversational UI development : build chatbots and voice user interfaces with Chatfuel, Dialogflow, Microsoft Bot Framework, Twilio, and Alexa Skills / Srini Janarthanam.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Janarthanam, Srini, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Google Apps.

Natural language processing (Computer science).

Application software--Development.

Application software.

Speech processing systems.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (369 pages) : illustrations (some color)

Edition:

1st edition

Place of Publication:

Birmingham, England : Packt, 2017.

System Details:

text file

Biography/History:

Janarthanam Srini: Srini Janarthanam is an expert in conversational systems and has been working in the field for over 15 years. He has led and worked on several projects, building conversational systems for a variety of domains including tourism, healthcare, and education. He obtained doctorate in Philosophy (PhD) from the University of Edinburgh for his work in Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing. He is currently the co-founder and director of Chatomate, a UK brand building tailored chatbots, AI, and automation solutions for businesses. Previously, he worked as a research associate at Heriot-Watt University and the University of Edinburgh. He has published over 50 articles and papers in online chatbot magazines, journals, and international research conferences.

Summary:

Build over 8 chatbots and conversational user interfaces with leading tools such as Chatfuel, Dialogflow, Microsoft Bot Framework, Twilio, Alexa Skills, and Google Actions and deploying them on channels like Facebook Messenger, Amazon Alexa and Google Home About This Book Understand the different use cases of Conversational UIs with this project-based guide Build feature-rich Chatbots and deploy them on multiple platforms Get real-world examples of voice-enabled UIs for personal and home assistance Who This Book Is For This book is for developers who are interested in creating interactive conversational UIs/Chatbots. A basic understanding of JavaScript and web APIs is required. What You Will Learn Design the flow of conversation between the user and the chatbot Create Task model chatbots for implementing tasks such as ordering food Get new toolkits and services in the chatbot ecosystem Integrate third-party information APIs to build interesting chatbots Find out how to deploy chatbots on messaging platforms Build a chatbot using MS Bot Framework See how to tweet, listen to tweets, and respond using a chatbot on Twitter Publish chatbots on Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa In Detail 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. Style and approach This is a practical book, where each chapter focuses on a chatbot project. The chapters take a st...

Contents:

Cover

Copyright

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewer

www.PacktPub.com

Customer Feedback

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

Conversational user interfaces

A brief history of chatbots

Recent developments

Architecture of a conversational user interface

Classification

Applications

Developer's toolkit

Mockup tools

Channels

Chatbot development tools

Analytics

Natural Language understanding

Directory services

Monetization

Benefits

Chatbots are here to stay

Lets get started!

References

Chapter 1: Tour Guide for Your City

Getting started

Building your first bot

Basic building blocks

Blocks

Cards

Buttons

Plugins

Attributes

Default blocks

Next steps

More cards

Image

Audio

Video

Quick replies

Gallery

List

Navigation

Go to block cards

Managing context

User input cards

Setting user attributes

Default contextual variables

Understanding natural language

Default block

Backend processing

Broadcasting

Bot templates

Summary

Chapter 2: Let's Talk Weather

Conversational tasks

Conversational design

Backend tasks

Getting weather data

Getting the API key

Trying your key

Building the backend interface

Implementing the chatbot

Creating a chatbot web service

Publishing on Facebook Messenger

Creating a Facebook Page

Creating a username

Creating a Facebook App

Creating a Facebook interface web app

Connecting the Facebook App and interface app

Testing your chatbot

Adding more testers

Making it public

More Facebook message formats

Content types

Image attachments

Audio attachments

Video attachments

Files

Templates

Button template

List template

Generic template

Summary.

References

Chapter 3: Building a Persona Bot

Introducing Dialogflow

Setting up Dialogflow

Creating a basic agent

Deploying the chatbot

Website integration

Facebook integration

Context

Entities

System entities

Rich response formats

Importing and exporting agents

Exporting, restoring, and importing agents

Exporting and importing intents and entities

Fulfillments

Chapter 4: Let's Catch a Train

Exploring Transport API

Creating a developer account

Exploring the dataset

Train stations near you

Response

Trains in the area

Live departures

Station timetables

Service timetables

Nearest station

Next train

Time of arrival

Building a simple SMS bot

Setting up the dashboard

Simple Message Sender

My train notifier

Scheduling tasks

Building a two-way chatbot

Understanding users' utterances

Creating an API.AI agent

Create a Node.js interface to the API.AI agent

Integrating API.AI agent to SMS chatbot

Chapter 5: Restaurant Search

MS Bot Framework

Channel emulator

Building a bot

Deploying your bot

More message types

Sending more than one message per turn

Prompting users for information

Rich messages

Conversation flow

Responding to user utterances

Keeping context intact

Context switching

Contextual NLU

Ending the conversation

Conversational state

Getting started with Zomato

Getting data from Zomato

Restaurant search bot

Connecting to Skype

Chapter 6: The News Bot

Getting started with the Twitter app

Building your first Twitter bot

Exploring the Twitter SDK

Updating your status

Retweet to your followers.

Searching for tweets

Exploring a news data service

Setting up NewsAPI

Building a Twitter news bot

Building a personalized news bot

Creating a database of user interests

Accessing the user interests database

Informing the bot of user interests

Chapter 7: My TV Guide

Amazon Alexa

Warming up with a quotes bot

Configuring your skill

Interaction model

Conversation manager - quotes

Test on Alexa

My TV guide

Building the interaction model

Setting up the TV skill server

Testing the TV skill

Built-in intents and slot types

Chapter 8: My Man Friday

Todoist

Getting the key

Adding a task

Retrieving all tasks for the day

Building an action

Building a Dialogflow agent

Creating a web app

Testing the agent on Dialogflow

Integrating with Google Assistant

Test on Google Home

Conclusion

Chapter 9: More Resources

Articles

List of conferences

List of magazines

Groups on social media

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references at the end of each chapters and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (ebrary, viewed February 5, 2018).

ISBN:

9781788298339

1788298330

9781788294669

1788294661

OCLC:

1020496764