Hands-On Chatbots and Conversational UI Development

384 Pages·014.847 MB·English

by  Srini Janarthanam

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
BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
Hands-On Chatbots and Conversational UI
Development
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First published: December 2017
Production reference: 1261217
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
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ISBN 978-1-78829-466-9
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Credits
Author Copy Editor
Srini Janarthanam Safis Editing
Reviewer Project Coordinator
Vamsi Venigalla Sheejal Shah
Commissioning Editor Proofreader
Kunal Chaudhari Safis Editing
Acquisition Editor Indexer
Siddharth Mandal Pratik Shirodkar
Content Development Editor Production Coordinator
Arun Nadar Melwyn D'sa
Technical Editor
Prajakta Mhatre
About the Author
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.
I am eternally grateful to everyone who supported me on this incredible journey. I thank
my wife, Jayanthi, my son, Advaith, my parents, and everyone in the family for their
encouragement, support, and help in this project. I want to thank my friends, Priyanka,
Anup, Thiru, Suresh, Jaya, Nara, Diwakar, and many others, for encouraging me to take
up this project and for keeping an eye on its progress throughout.
I want to thank the reviewers of the book for lending a hand to shape the book to make it
what it is now. I also want to thank the entire team at Packt Publishing who have an
enormous share in getting this book to you.
Finally, I want to thank God for giving me an opportunity to discover my strengths and
for his grace and support to accomplish writing this book.
About the Reviewer
Vamsi Venigalla is a technology leader with over 12 years of experience in building
technology organizations, strategic planning, rolling out multiple transformational
platforms/products, IT program and project management, strategy and transformation
(business, people, process, and technology), and delivering results for various business
functions across mobile, sourcing, financial systems, HR, retail and supply chain in the food
production and manufacturing domains.
Vamsi graduated with a master's degree in computer science from North Carolina State
University, NC.
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Table of Contents
Preface
1
Chapter 1: Introduction
7
Conversational user interfaces 8
A brief history of chatbots 9
Recent developments 10
Architecture of a conversational user interface 12
Classification 13
Applications 14
Developer's toolkit 15
Mockup tools 15
Channels 16
Chatbot development tools 16
Analytics 17
Natural Language understanding 17
Directory services 18
Monetization 18
Benefits 18
Chatbots are here to stay 19
Lets get started! 21
References 21
Chapter 2: Tour Guide for Your City
22
Getting started 23
Building your first bot 25
Basic building blocks 28
Blocks 29
Cards 29
Buttons 29
Plugins 29
Attributes 30
Default blocks 30
Next steps 31
More cards 35
Image 35