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"Hello, I'm Ginger, your virtual representative. How can I help you today?"
"I'm sorry you aren't feeling well today, George. Do you need to schedule a sick day?"
"Choosing an engagement ring is an exciting event! Let me help you find the perfect diamond."
Welcome to the chatbot revolution! Nowadays, chatbots are talking you through your taxes, recommending suitable places to eat out, and even helping diagnose medical conditions. Chatbots can be interesting, fun, and challenging beasts to develop, and Building Chatbots with Microsoft Bot Framework and Node.js is your guide to the latest ideas and technologies for making virtual conversational companions that get the job done.
about the technology
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. With more and more chatbots being deployed, it's increasingly important to learn the best practices and the right development tools. Microsoft Bot Framework offers a fast track to building great chatbots you can deploy on websites or via SMS, Slack, Skype, and beyond. It offers a comfortable development environment that uses C# or Node so you can apply the dev skills you already have to this exciting new frontier.about the book
Building Chatbots with Microsoft Bot Framework and Node.js walks you concept-by-concept through the process of building your own capable chatbot. With this in-depth, practical book you'll learn the basics of chatbot design, development, and deployment by building a virtual health assistant. After getting started with the incredibly helpful Microsoft Bot Framework, you'll lay down the foundations for the health assistant bot. Then, you'll introduce natural language processing to mimic human speech patterns so your bot can understand and engage in conversations. Through practical examples and tutorials, you'll master conversation flow principles and apply prompts and waterfall dialogs to get your bot talking smoothly as it gathers data. You'll also master adding an external database, analytics, and the ability for your bot to respond to images and buttons. Finally, you'll learn how to deploy your finished chatbot on Slack, Facebook, and Skype so it can interact with the world!what's inside
- Understanding Microsoft Bot Framework
- Using NLP for natural conversations
- Working with prompts and dialogs
- Maintaining context with databags
- Connecting to external databases
- Setting up analytics
- Deploying your finished bot
about the reader
Written for developers with basic knowledge of HTTP and Node. No prior experience with chatbots is needed.about the author
G Akshay Kulkarni is the founder of ozz.ai which is a NLP tool for chatbots. Prior to this he worked at Microsoft for 2 years, building several chatbots and training other employees to do the same during his time there. He is also the creator of several open source projects, including Flask Wizard, a python framework for building chatbots, and Api.ai Recognizer, which lets you use api.ai alongside Microsoft Bot Framework.After the first chapter my imagination was stimulated and I couldn't wait to get more details.
An excellent introduction to chatbots in general.
This book gives an excellent introduction to using a range of Microsoft technologies to build your own working chatbots.
