This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Chatbot Research and Design, CONVERSATIONS 2019, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in November 2019. The 18 revised full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 31 submissions. The papers are grouped in the following topical sections: user and communication studies user experience and design, chatbots for collaboration, chatbots for customer service, and chatbots in education.
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
This book constitutes the proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Chatbot Research and Design, CONVERSATIONS 2021, which was held during November 2021.Due to COVID-19 pandemic the conference was held online. The 12 papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 25 submissions. The papers in the proceedings are structured in four topical groups: Chatbot User Insight, Chatbots Supporting Collaboration and Social Interaction, and Chatbot UX and Design.
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.
A chatbot is expected to be capable of supporting a cohesive and coherent conversation and be knowledgeable, which makes it one of the most complex intelligent systems being designed nowadays. Designers have to learn to combine intuitive, explainable language understanding and reasoning approaches with high-performance statistical and deep learning technologies. Today, there are two popular paradigms for chatbot construction: 1. Build a bot platform with universal NLP and ML capabilities so that a bot developer for a particular enterprise, not being an expert, can populate it with training data; 2. Accumulate a huge set of training dialogue data, feed it to a deep learning network and expect the trained chatbot to automatically learn “how to chat”. Although these two approaches are reported to imitate some intelligent dialogues, both of them are unsuitable for enterprise chatbots, being unreliable and too brittle. The latter approach is based on a belief that some learning miracle will happen and a chatbot will start functioning without a thorough feature and domain engineering by an expert and interpretable dialogue management algorithms. Enterprise high-performance chatbots with extensive domain knowledge require a mix of statistical, inductive, deep machine learning and learning from the web, syntactic, semantic and discourse NLP, ontology-based reasoning and a state machine to control a dialogue. This book will provide a comprehensive source of algorithms and architectures for building chatbots for various domains based on the recent trends in computational linguistics and machine learning. The foci of this book are applications of discourse analysis in text relevant assessment, dialogue management and content generation, which help to overcome the limitations of platform-based and data driven-based approaches. Supplementary material and code is available at https://github.com/bgalitsky/relevance-based-on-parse-trees
Welcome to the future, where you can talk with the digital things around you: voice assistants, chatbots, and more. But these interactions can be unhelpful and frustrating—sometimes even offensive or biased. Conversations with Things teaches you how to design conversations that are useful, ethical, and human–centered—because everyone deserves to be understood, especially you.
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
In the field of information retrieval, the challenge lies in the speed and accuracy with which users can access relevant data. With the increasing complexity of digital interactions, the need for a solution that transcends traditional methods becomes evident. Human involvement and manual investigation are not only time-consuming but also prone to errors, hindering the seamless exchange of information in various sectors. Design and Development of Emerging Chatbot Technology emerges as a comprehensive solution to the predicament posed by traditional information retrieval methods. Focusing on the transformative power of chatbots, it delves into the intricacies of their operation, applications, and development. Designed for academic scholars across diverse disciplines, the book serves as a beacon for those seeking a deeper understanding of chatbots and their potential to revolutionize information retrieval in customer service, education, healthcare, e-commerce, and more.
With recent advances in natural language understanding techniques and far-field microphone arrays, natural language interfaces, such as voice assistants and chatbots, are emerging as a popular new way to interact with computers. They have made their way out of the industry research labs and into the pockets, desktops, cars and living rooms of the general public. But although such interfaces recognize bits of natural language, and even voice input, they generally lack conversational competence, or the ability to engage in natural conversation. Today’s platforms provide sophisticated tools for analyzing language and retrieving knowledge, but they fail to provide adequate support for modeling interaction. The user experience (UX) designer or software developer must figure out how a human conversation is organized, usually relying on commonsense rather than on formal knowledge. Fortunately, practitioners can rely on conversation science. This book adapts formal knowledge from the field of Conversation Analysis (CA) to the design of natural language interfaces. It outlines the Natural Conversation Framework (NCF), developed at IBM Research, a systematic framework for designing interfaces that work like natural conversation. The NCF consists of four main components: 1) an interaction model of “expandable sequences,” 2) a corresponding content format, 3) a pattern language with 100 generic UX patterns and 4) a navigation method of six basic user actions. The authors introduce UX designers to a new way of thinking about user experience design in the context of conversational interfaces, including a new vocabulary, new principles and new interaction patterns. User experience designers and graduate students in the HCI field as well as developers and conversation analysis students should find this book of interest.
This volume represents the proceedings of the 3rd Eurasian Conference on Educational Innovation 2020 (ECEI 2020). Thes conference is organized by the International Institute of Knowledge Innovation and Invention (IIKII), and was held on February 5-7, 2020 in Hanoi, Vietnam.ECEI 2020 provides a unified communication platform for researchers in a range of topics in education innovation and other related fields. This proceedings volume enables interdisciplinary collaboration of science and engineering technologists. It is a fine starting point for establishing an international network in the academic and industrial fields.
