Hands-On Chatbots and Conversational UI Development


Book Description

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.




Deep Learning with Azure


Book Description

Get up-to-speed with Microsoft's AI Platform. Learn to innovate and accelerate with open and powerful tools and services that bring artificial intelligence to every data scientist and developer. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the new normal. Innovations in deep learning algorithms and hardware are happening at a rapid pace. It is no longer a question of should I build AI into my business, but more about where do I begin and how do I get started with AI? Written by expert data scientists at Microsoft, Deep Learning with the Microsoft AI Platform helps you with the how-to of doing deep learning on Azure and leveraging deep learning to create innovative and intelligent solutions. Benefit from guidance on where to begin your AI adventure, and learn how the cloud provides you with all the tools, infrastructure, and services you need to do AI. What You'll Learn Become familiar with the tools, infrastructure, and services available for deep learning on Microsoft Azure such as Azure Machine Learning services and Batch AI Use pre-built AI capabilities (Computer Vision, OCR, gender, emotion, landmark detection, and more) Understand the common deep learning models, including convolutional neural networks (CNNs), recurrent neural networks (RNNs), generative adversarial networks (GANs) with sample code and understand how the field is evolving Discover the options for training and operationalizing deep learning models on Azure Who This Book Is For Professional data scientists who are interested in learning more about deep learning and how to use the Microsoft AI platform. Some experience with Python is helpful.




Building Bots with Microsoft Bot Framework


Book Description

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.




Reprogramming the American Dream


Book Description

** #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller ** In this essential book written by a rural native and Silicon Valley veteran, Microsoft’s Chief technology officer tackles one of the most critical issues facing society today: the future of artificial intelligence and how it can be realistically used to promote growth, even in a shifting employment landscape. There are two prevailing stories about AI: for heartland low- and middle-skill workers, a dystopian tale of steadily increasing job destruction; for urban knowledge workers and the professional class, a utopian tale of enhanced productivity and convenience. But there is a third way to look at this technology that will revolutionize the workplace and ultimately the world. Kevin Scott argues that AI has the potential to create abundance and opportunity for everyone and help solve some of our most vexing problems. As the chief technology officer at Microsoft, he is deeply involved in the development of AI applications, yet mindful of their potential impact on workers—knowledge he gained firsthand growing up in rural Virginia. Yes, the AI Revolution will radically disrupt economics and employment for everyone for generations to come. But what if leaders prioritized the programming of both future technology and public policy to work together to find solutions ahead of the coming AI epoch? Like public health, the space program, climate change and public education, we need international understanding and collaboration on the future of AI and work. For Scott, the crucial question facing all of us is this: How do we work to ensure that the continued development of AI allows us to keep the American Dream alive? In this thoughtful, informed guide, he offers a clear roadmap to find the answer.




Empowering Organizations with Power Virtual Agents


Book Description

Unleash the capabilities of Power Virtual Agents to provide actionable insights to your customers and employees using automated chatbot solutions Key FeaturesProvide instant customer support on your webpages using Power Virtual AgentsDiscover tips and techniques for the governance, administration, and deployment of chatbotsBuild conversational solutions for your web apps, public portals, and Teams environmentBook Description Power Virtual Agents is a set of technologies released under the Power Platform umbrella by Microsoft. It allows non-developers to create solutions to automate customer interactions and provide services using a conversational interface, thus relieving the pressure on front-line staff providing this kind of support. Empowering Organizations with Power Virtual Agents is a guide to building chatbots that can be deployed to handle front desk services without having to write code. The book takes a scenario-based approach to implementing bot services and automation to serve employees in the organization and external customers. You will uncover the features available in Power Virtual Agents for creating bots that can be integrated into an organization's public site as well as specific web pages. Next, you will understand how to build bots and integrate them within the Teams environment for internal users. As you progress, you will explore complete examples for implementing automated agents (bots) that can be deployed on sites for interacting with external customers. By the end of this Power Virtual Agents chatbot book, you will have implemented several scenarios to serve external client requests for information, created scenarios to help internal users retrieve relevant information, and processed these in an automated conversational manner. What you will learnGet to grips with Power Virtual Agents and understand the license requirement for using itDeploy bots on public websites or web pagesCreate conversational solutions for your organization using Microsoft TeamsExplore best practices for governance that are essential for implementing Power Virtual AgentsExplore different business scenarios for implementing Power Virtual AgentsUnderstand the integration between Power Virtual Agents and Microsoft Power PlatformWho this book is for This book is for organization representatives looking to automate processes, relieve the first-contact workload of their front-line agents, and provide actionable results to employees and customers. Business professionals, citizen developers, and functional consultants will also find this book helpful. Familiarity with the Modern Workplace and the Dynamics 365 family of products will be useful. Beginner-level knowledge of Power Platform and its main modules will assist with understanding the concepts covered in the book more effectively.




Microsoft Azure Essentials Azure Machine Learning


Book Description

Microsoft Azure Essentials from Microsoft Press is a series of free ebooks designed to help you advance your technical skills with Microsoft Azure. This third ebook in the series introduces Microsoft Azure Machine Learning, a service that a developer can use to build predictive analytics models (using training datasets from a variety of data sources) and then easily deploy those models for consumption as cloud web services. The ebook presents an overview of modern data science theory and principles, the associated workflow, and then covers some of the more common machine learning algorithms in use today. It builds a variety of predictive analytics models using real world data, evaluates several different machine learning algorithms and modeling strategies, and then deploys the finished models as machine learning web services on Azure within a matter of minutes. The ebook also expands on a working Azure Machine Learning predictive model example to explore the types of client and server applications you can create to consume Azure Machine Learning web services. Watch Microsoft Press’s blog and Twitter (@MicrosoftPress) to learn about other free ebooks in the Microsoft Azure Essentials series.




Programming the Microsoft Bot Framework


Book Description

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.




Conversational AI


Book Description

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




Developing Cognitive Bots Using the IBM Watson Engine


Book Description

Cognitive Virtual Bots are taking the technology and user experience world by storm. This book provides clear guidance on how different cognitive platforms can be used to develop Cognitive Virtual Assistants that enable a conversation by using DialogFlow and advanced Natural Language Processing. You will start by understanding the technology landscape and various use cases that Cognitive Virtual Assistants can be used in. Early chapters will take you through the basics of Cognitive Virtual Assistants, before moving onto advanced concepts and hands on examples of using IBM Watson Assistant and its advanced configurations with Watson Discovery Services, Watson Knowledge Studio and Spellchecker Service. You'll then examine integrations that enrich the Cognitive Virtual Assistant by providing data around weather, locations, stock markets. The book concludes by providing a glimpse of what to expect in the future for Cognitive Virtual Assistants. What You'll Learn Review the fundamentals of Cognitive Virtual Assistants.Develop a Cognitive Virtual Assistant from scratch using IBM Watson platform.Integrate and enrich your Virtual Agent with other services such as weather, location and stocks.Instantly deliver your bot on major messaging channels such as Skype, SMS, and WebchatTrain your Cognitive Virtual Agent on specific use cases.Who This Book Is ForAI and machine learning engineers, cognitive solutions architects and developers would find the book extremely useful