With so many flesh-and-blood humans needing support, digital assistants can offer a valuable service finding out what users need and improving the basic process of online data gathering. Building Chatbots with Microsoft Bot Framework and Node.js walks readers concept-by-concept through the process of building their own capable chatbot. With this in-depth, practical book readers learn the basics of chatbot design, development, and deployment by building a virtual health assistant. Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications.

Build intelligent and smart conversational interfaces using Microsoft Bot Framework About This Book Develop various real-world intelligent bots from scratch using Microsoft Bot Framework Integrate your bots with most popular conversation platforms such as Skype, Slack, and Facebook Messenger Flaunt your bot building skills in your organization by thoroughly understanding and implementing the bot development concepts such as messages (rich text and pictures), dialogs, and third-party authentication and calling Who This Book Is For This book is for developers who are keen on building powerful services with great and interactive bot interface. Experience with C# is needed. What You Will Learn Set up a development environment and install all the required software to get started programming a bot Publish a bot to Slack, Skype, and the Facebook Messenger platform Develop a fully functional weather bot that communicates the current weather in a given city Help your bot identify the intent of a text with the help of LUIS in order to make decisions Integrate an API into your bot development Build an IVR solution Explore the concept of MicroServices and see how MicroServices can be used in bot development Develop an IoT project, deploy it, and connect it to a bot In Detail Bots help users to use the language as a UI and interact with the applications from any platform. This book teaches you how to develop real-world bots using Microsoft Bot Framework. The book starts with setting up the Microsoft Bot Framework development environment and emulator, and moves on to building the first bot using Connector and Builder SDK. Explore how to register, connect, test, and publish your bot to the Slack, Skype, and Facebook Messenger platforms. Throughout this book, you will build different types of bots from simple to complex, such as a weather bot, a natural speech and intent processing bot, an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) bot for a bank, a facial expression recognition bot, and more from scratch. These bots were designed and developed to teach you concepts such as text detection, implementing LUIS dialogs, Cortana Intelligence Services, third-party authentication, Rich Text format, Bot State Service, and microServices so you can practice working with the standard development tools such as Visual Studio, Bot Emulator, and Azure. Style and approach This step-by-step guide takes a learn-while-doing approach, delivering the practical knowledge and experience you need to design and build real-world Bots. The concepts come to you on an as-needed basis while developing a bot so you increase your programming knowledge and experience at the same time.

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.

Automate workflow and internal communication processes and provide customer service without apps using messaging and interactive botsAbout This Book* Create interactive bots on platforms such as Facebook Messenger, Kik, Telegram, and Skype to automate workflows* Create a bot that works with SQL Server and Skype to deal with HR requests within a company* Work with some of the most cutting-edge and widely-used APIs and messaging platforms to create interactive customer-facing experiences and automate workWho This Book Is ForThis is a book for Node.js developers who want to build powerful bots for customer-facing and internal workflow automation.What you will learn* Create a bot template that responds to e-mails based on certain ruling criteria* Interact with SMS and perform some basic Natural Language Processing using the Twilio API for Node.js* Work with the Skype Web SDK and Node.js to create a bot that works with SQL Server and Skype* Build an automated Flight Information Agent bot using the Twitter and Google Flights APIs* Use the Slack API to create a team collaboration task management (to-do list) bot* Create a scheduling bot for teams using the Facebook Messenger API* Interact with BotKit along with MySQL and Amazon S3 to create a document management bot in Node.js* Leverage ICR and Azure Table Storage from Node.js to create a bug tracking bot* Integrate Force.com API and Kik to create a Salesforce CRM botIn DetailThe bots are taking over! Messenger-based bots are expected to become the dominant software UI for the next generation of applications. Slack, Telegram, and Facebook are driving a new approach where "threads are the new apps."This book shows you how to create work automation bots that interact with users through Slack, e-mail, Skype, Twitter, and more using Node.js. You'll learn to create conversational UIs for your Node.js apps, and then use those UIs to provide workflow automation tools. You will handle customer service requests that come in through messenger systems.Then, you'll interpret the natural language to reveal the user's intent and respond accordingly. You will also learn how to automate processes that involve several people, such as processing holiday requests, arranging meetings, or sending updated reports on time. Last, you'll create bots that can handle and manipulate documents, URLs, and other items of content.By the end of the book, you will understand the importance of bots and why they are beneficial to any organization.

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.

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.

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.