Preface

Building chatbots is fun. Although chatbots are just another kind of software, they are very different in terms of the expectations that they create in users. Chatbots are conversational. This ability to process language makes them project a kind of human personality and intelligence, whether we as developers intend it to be so or not. To develop software with a personality and intelligence is quite challenging and therefore interesting.

This is a book for programmers who are interested in exploring the world of conversational user interfaces. This book is organized as eight chatbot projects that will introduce the ecosystem of tools, techniques, concepts, and even gadgets relating to conversational interfaces. We will start exploring basic chatbots using button interfaces and move toward using text utterances and finally voice. We will begin with a no-code platform to build our first chatbot and move on to exploring libraries and services to program the modules ourselves. Every chapter is a unique project with the objective of building a conversational interface to a data source. We will seek to understand the data, identify conversational tasks, carry out conversation design, and finally follow step-by-step instructions to implement the interface.