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

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.

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

From Facebook Messenger to Kik, and from Slack bots to Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and email bots, the new conversational apps are revolutionizing the way we interact with software. This practical guide shows you how to design and build great conversational experiences and delightful bots that help people be more productive, whether it’s for a new consumer service or an enterprise efficiency product. Ideal for designers, product managers, and entrepreneurs, this book explores what works and what doesn’t in real-world bot examples, and provides practical design patterns for your bot-building toolbox. You’ll learn how to use an effective onboarding process, outline different flows, define a bot personality, and choose the right balance of rich control and text. Explore different bot use-cases and design best practices Understand bot anatomy—such as brand and personality, conversations, advanced UI controls—and their associated design patterns Learn steps for building a Facebook Messenger consumer bot and a Slack business bot Explore the lessons learned and shared experiences of designers and entrepreneurs who have built bots Design and prototype your first bot, and experiment with user feedback

Real-time conversations turn leads into customers Conversational Marketing is the definitive guide to generating better leads and closing more sales. Traditional sales and marketing methods have failed to keep pace with the way modern, internet-savvy consumers purchase goods and services. Modern messaging apps, which allow for real-time conversations and instant feedback, have transformed the way we interact in our personal and professional lives, yet most businesses still rely on 20th century technology to communicate with 21st century customers. Online forms, email inquiries, and follow-up sales calls don’t provide the immediacy that modern consumers expect. Conversational marketing and sales are part of a new methodology centered around real-time, one-on-one conversations with customers via chatbots and messaging. By allowing your business to communicate with customers in real time—when it’s most convenient for them—conversational marketing improves the customer experience, generates more leads, and helps you convert more leads into customers. Conversational Marketing pioneers David Cancel and Dave Gerhardt explain how to: Merge inbound and outbound tactics into a more productive dialog with customers Integrate conversational marketing techniques into your existing sales and marketing workflow Face-to-face meetings, phone calls, and email exchanges remain important to customer relations, but adding a layer of immediate, individual conversation drives the customer experience—and sales—sky-high.

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.

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.