Build Better Chatbots

by Rashid Khan

Author	: Rashid Khan
Publisher	: Apress
Total Pages	: 113
Release	: 2017-12-13
Genre	: Computers
ISBN	: 1484231112

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Learn best practices for building bots by focusing on the technological implementation and UX in this practical book. You will cover key topics such as setting up a development environment for creating chatbots for multiple channels (Facebook Messenger, Skype, and KiK); building a chatbot (design to implementation); integrating to IFTT (If This Then That) and IoT (Internet of Things); carrying out analytics and metrics for chatbots; and most importantly monetizing models and business sense for chatbots. Build Better Chatbots is easy to follow with code snippets provided in the book and complete code open sourced and available to download. With Facebook opening up its Messenger platform for developers, followed by Microsoft opening up Skype for development, a new channel has emerged for brands to acquire, engage, and service customers on chat with chatbots. What You Will Learn Work with the bot development life cycle Master bot UX design Integrate into the bot ecosystem Maximize the business and monetization potential for bots Who This Book Is For Developers, programmers, and hobbyists who have basic programming knowledge. The book can be used by existing chatbot developers to gain a better understanding of analytics and the business side of bots.

Build Chatbot Interactions

by Daniel Pritchett

Author	: Daniel Pritchett
Publisher	: Pragmatic Bookshelf
Total Pages	: 284
Release	: 2019-06-13
Genre	: Computers
ISBN	: 1680507095

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The next step in the evolution of user interfaces is here. Chatbots let your users interact with your service in their own natural language. Use free and open source tools along with Ruby to build creative, useful, and unexpected interactions for users. Take advantage of the Lita framework's step-by-step implementation strategy to simplify bot development and testing. From novices to experts, chatbots are an area in which everyone can participate. Exercise your creativity by creating chatbot skills for communicating, information, and fun. Developers of all skill levels can craft user experiences that are natural, easy to use, and most of all, fun. Build chatbots using free, open source tools and launch them to popular chat platforms like Slack and Amazon's Alexa. Use the Ruby programming language and the Lita bot framework to unlock fun and powerful chat abilities such as sending text messages and emails, creating new meme images, driving a robot around the room, and talking out loud on a home speaker. Use frameworks available in Ruby and Node.js to get started quickly. Create simple chatbot skills that respond quickly to basic requests. Chain skills together for more complex interactions. Take advantage of test-driven development techniques to build your bots with confidence. Coordinate tasks with colleagues via bot. Connect with external APIs to provide users with data they need. Extract data information from web pages when an API isn't available. Expand your bot's reach with SMS and e-mail messaging. Deploy a chatbot to a host so users can interact with it on their schedule. Build a more responsive, easy-to-use interface for your users today. What You Need: You don't need much to get started with chatbots. A Mac or Linux computer with a recent version of Ruby is recommended. Windows users can keep up with a free virtual machine running Linux. You'll deploy your chatbots for free (or at least cheaply) on cloud hosting platforms like Heroku and Digital Ocean.

Building Chatbots with Python

by Sumit Raj

Author	: Sumit Raj
Publisher	: Apress
Total Pages	: 205
Release	: 2018-12-12
Genre	: Computers
ISBN	: 1484240960

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Build your own chatbot using Python and open source tools. This book begins with an introduction to chatbots where you will gain vital information on their architecture. You will then dive straight into natural language processing with the natural language toolkit (NLTK) for building a custom language processing platform for your chatbot. With this foundation, you will take a look at different natural language processing techniques so that you can choose the right one for you. The next stage is to learn to build a chatbot using the API.ai platform and define its intents and entities. During this example, you will learn to enable communication with your bot and also take a look at key points of its integration and deployment. The final chapter of Building Chatbots with Python teaches you how to build, train, and deploy your very own chatbot. Using open source libraries and machine learning techniques you will learn to predict conditions for your bot and develop a conversational agent as a web application. Finally you will deploy your chatbot on your own server with AWS. What You Will Learn Gain the basics of natural language processing using Python Collect data and train your data for the chatbot Build your chatbot from scratch as a web app Integrate your chatbots with Facebook, Slack, and Telegram Deploy chatbots on your own server Who This Book Is For Intermediate Python developers who have no idea about chatbots. Developers with basic Python programming knowledge can also take advantage of the book.

Hands-On Chatbots and Conversational UI Development

by Srini Janarthanam

Author	: Srini Janarthanam
Publisher	: Packt Publishing Ltd
Total Pages	: 383
Release	: 2017-12-29
Genre	: Computers
ISBN	: 1788298330

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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 step-by-step approach to help you build intelligent chatbots that act as personal assistants.

Conversational AI

by Andrew Freed

Author	: Andrew Freed
Publisher	: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages	: 318
Release	: 2021-10-12
Genre	: Computers
ISBN	: 1617298832

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Design, develop, and deploy human-like AI solutions that chat with your customers, solve their problems, and streamline your support services. In Conversational AI, you will learn how to: Pick the right AI assistant type and channel for your needs Write dialog with intentional tone and specificity Train your AI’s classifier from the ground up Create question-and-direct-response AI assistants Design and optimize a process flow for web and voice Test your assistant’s accuracy and plan out improvements Conversational AI: Chatbots that work teaches you to create the kind of AI-enabled assistants that are revolutionizing the customer service industry. You’ll learn to build effective conversational AI that can automate common inquiries and easily address your customers' most common problems. This engaging and entertaining book delivers the essential technical and creative skills for designing successful AI solutions, from coding process flows and training machine learning, to improving your written dialog. Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the technology Create AI-driven chatbots and other intelligent agents that humans actually enjoy talking to! Adding intelligence to automated response systems saves time and money for you and your customers. Conversational AI systems excel at routine tasks such as answering common questions, classifying issues, and routing customers to the appropriate human staff. This book will show you how to build effective, production-ready AI assistants. About the book Conversational AI is a guide to creating AI-driven voice and text agents for customer support and other conversational tasks. This practical and entertaining book combines design theory with techniques for building and training AI systems. In it, you’ll learn how to find training data, assess performance, and write dialog that sounds human. You’ll go from building simple chatbots to designing the voice assistant for a complete call center. What's inside Pick the right AI for your needs Train your AI classifier Create question-and-direct-response assistants Design and optimize a process flow About the reader For software developers. Examples use Watson Assistant and Python. About the author Andrew R. Freed is a Master Inventor and Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM. He has worked in AI solutions since 2012. Table of Contents PART 1 FOUNDATIONS 1 Introduction to conversational AI 2 Building your first conversational AI PART 2 DESIGNING FOR SUCCESS 3 Designing effective processes 4 Designing effective dialogue 5 Building a successful AI assistant PART 3 TRAINING AND TESTING 6 Training your assistant 7 How accurate is your assistant? 8 Testing your dialogue flows PART 4 MAINTENANCE 9 Deployment and management 10 Improving your assistant PART 5 ADVANCED/OPTIONAL TOPICS 11 Building your own classifier 12 Additional training for voice assistants

Programming the Microsoft Bot Framework

by Joe Mayo

Author	: Joe Mayo
Publisher	: Microsoft Press
Total Pages	: 974
Release	: 2017-11-21
Genre	: Computers
ISBN	: 1509305025

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This is the only comprehensive, authoritative guide to building Conversational User Interfaces (CUI, a.k.a. bots, chatbots, or chatterbots) with the Microsoft Bot Framework. Reflecting the next radical revolution in human-computer interaction, it will help you leverage advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing to empower new and existing applications with stunningly intuitive conversational interfaces. Long-time Microsoft MVP Joe Mayo begins with high-level explanations of what Microsoft Bot Framework is, what you can do with it, and why it matters so much. Next, he presents the foundational knowledge you need to start creating real bots and CUIs. Step by step, you'll learn how to build message dialogs, manage conversations, interact with framework APIs, and incorporate powerful natural language processing with Microsoft's advanced Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS). Mayo also offers detailed guidance on deploying your customized bots to key platforms such as Slack, Skype, and Facebook Messenger. Throughout, Mayo's practical examples combine code with clear explanations of when and why you would perform each task. From start to finish, Programming the Microsoft Bot Framework is relentlessly practical, helping you translate the advanced "magic" of intelligent bots into real solutions right now.

Developing Enterprise Chatbots

by Boris Galitsky

Author	: Boris Galitsky
Publisher	: Springer
Total Pages	: 566
Release	: 2019-04-04
Genre	: Computers
ISBN	: 3030042995

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A chatbot is expected to be capable of supporting a cohesive and coherent conversation and be knowledgeable, which makes it one of the most complex intelligent systems being designed nowadays. Designers have to learn to combine intuitive, explainable language understanding and reasoning approaches with high-performance statistical and deep learning technologies. Today, there are two popular paradigms for chatbot construction: 1. Build a bot platform with universal NLP and ML capabilities so that a bot developer for a particular enterprise, not being an expert, can populate it with training data; 2. Accumulate a huge set of training dialogue data, feed it to a deep learning network and expect the trained chatbot to automatically learn “how to chat”. Although these two approaches are reported to imitate some intelligent dialogues, both of them are unsuitable for enterprise chatbots, being unreliable and too brittle. The latter approach is based on a belief that some learning miracle will happen and a chatbot will start functioning without a thorough feature and domain engineering by an expert and interpretable dialogue management algorithms. Enterprise high-performance chatbots with extensive domain knowledge require a mix of statistical, inductive, deep machine learning and learning from the web, syntactic, semantic and discourse NLP, ontology-based reasoning and a state machine to control a dialogue. This book will provide a comprehensive source of algorithms and architectures for building chatbots for various domains based on the recent trends in computational linguistics and machine learning. The foci of this book are applications of discourse analysis in text relevant assessment, dialogue management and content generation, which help to overcome the limitations of platform-based and data driven-based approaches. Supplementary material and code is available at https://github.com/bgalitsky/relevance-based-on-parse-trees

Building an Enterprise Chatbot

by Abhishek Singh

Author	: Abhishek Singh
Publisher	: Apress
Total Pages	: 399
Release	: 2019-09-13
Genre	: Computers
ISBN	: 1484250346

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Explore the adoption of chatbots in business by focusing on the design, deployment, and continuous improvement of chatbots in a business, with a single use-case from the banking and insurance sector. This book starts by identifying the business processes in the banking and insurance industry. This involves data collection from sources such as conversations from customer service centers, online chats, emails, and other NLP sources. You’ll then design the solution architecture of the chatbot. Once the architecture is framed, the author goes on to explain natural language understanding (NLU), natural language processing (NLP), and natural language generation (NLG) with examples. In the next sections, you'll design and implement the backend framework of a typical chatbot from scratch. You will also explore some popular open-source chatbot frameworks such as Dialogflow and LUIS. The authors then explain how you can integrate various third-party services and enterprise databases with the custom chatbot framework. In the final section, you'll discuss how to deploy the custom chatbot framework on the AWS cloud. By the end of Building an Enterprise Chatbot, you will be able to design and develop an enterprise-ready conversational chatbot using an open source development platform to serve the end user. What You Will LearnIdentify business processes where chatbots could be usedFocus on building a chatbot for one industry and one use-case rather than building a ubiquitous and generic chatbot Design the solution architecture for a chatbotIntegrate chatbots with internal data sources using APIsDiscover the differences between natural language understanding (NLU), natural language processing (NLP), and natural language generation (NLG) Work with deployment and continuous improvement through representational learning Who This Book Is ForData scientists and enterprise architects who are currently looking to deploy chatbot solutions to their business.

Designing Voice User Interfaces

by Cathy Pearl

Author	: Cathy Pearl
Publisher	: "O'Reilly Media, Inc."
Total Pages	: 278
Release	: 2016-12-19
Genre	: Computers
ISBN	: 1491955384

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Voice user interfaces (VUIs) are becoming all the rage today. But how do you build one that people can actually converse with? Whether you’re designing a mobile app, a toy, or a device such as a home assistant, this practical book guides you through basic VUI design principles, helps you choose the right speech recognition engine, and shows you how to measure your VUI’s performance and improve upon it. Author Cathy Pearl also takes product managers, UX designers, and VUI designers into advanced design topics that will help make your VUI not just functional, but great.Understand key VUI design concepts, including command-and-control and conversational systemsDecide if you should use an avatar or other visual representation with your VUIExplore speech recognition technology and its impact on your designTake your VUI above and beyond the basic exchange of informationLearn practical ways to test your VUI application with usersMonitor your app and learn how to quickly improve performanceGet real-world examples of VUIs for home assistants, smartwatches, and car systems