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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
Create conversational UIs using cutting-edge frameworks
Key Features
- Build AI chatbots and voicebots using practical and accessible toolkits
- Design and create voicebots that really shine in front of humans
- Work with familiar appliances like Alexa, Google Home, and FB Messenger
- Design for UI success across different industries and use cases
Book Description
We are entering the age of conversational interfaces, where we will interact with AI bots using chat and voice. But how do we create a good conversation? How do we design and build voicebots and chatbots that can carry successful conversations in in the real world?
In this book, Rachel Batish introduces us to the world of conversational applications, bots and AI. You'll discover how - with little technical knowledge - you can build successful and meaningful conversational UIs. You'll find detailed guidance on how to build and deploy bots on the leading conversational platforms, including Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Facebook Messenger.
You'll then learn key design aspects for building conversational UIs that will really succeed and shine in front of humans. You'll discover how your AI bots can become part of a meaningful conversation with humans, using techniques such as persona shaping, and tone analysis.
For successful bots in the real world, you'll explore important use-cases and examples where humans interact with bots. With examples across finance, travel, and e-commerce, you'll see how you can create successful conversational UIs in any sector.
Expand your horizons further as Rachel shares with you her insights into cutting-edge voicebot and chatbot technologies, and how the future might unfold. Join in right now and start building successful, high impact bots!
What you will learn
- Build your own AI voicebots and chatbots
- Use familiar appliances like Alexa, Google Home, and Facebook Messenger
- Master the elements of conversational user interfaces
- Key design techniques to make your bots successful
- Use tone analysis to deepen UI conversation for humans
- Create voicebots and UIs designed for real-world situations
- Insightful case studies in finance, travel, and e-commerce
- Cutting-edge technology and insight into the future of AI bots
Who this book is for
This book is for you, if you want to deepen your appreciation of UI and how conversational UIs - driven by artificial intelligence - are transforming the way humans interact with computers, appliances, and the everyday world around us. This book works with the major UI toolkits available today, so you do not need a deep programming knowledge to build the bots in this book: a basic familiarity with markup languages and JavaScript will give you everything you need to start building cutting-edge conversational UIs.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Seitenzahl: 229
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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Voicebot and Chatbot Design
Voicebot and Chatbot Design
Copyright © 2018 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
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Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
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First published: September 2018
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Contributors
About the author
Rachel Batish is the co-founder and CRO of Conversation.one, the build-once-deploy-everywhere platform for conversational apps, which leverages machine learning to maximize the interaction between people and devices. Rachel is responsible for the company's sales and marketing strategies, and is actively involved in the product's roadmap and in the growing voice community.
Prior to founding Conversation.one, Rachel founded Zuznow, an AI platform for building mobile apps, and led the company from $0 to $1 M in revenue.
Rachel has a BA in political science and an MA in international relations.
I would like to thank, first and foremost, my colleague and partner, Chen Levkovich, for walking with me through this fascinating journey of conversational design and for constantly challenging me to strive for more.
I would also like to dedicate this book to my beloved mother, Judith, whose voice I miss the most.
About the reviewers
Jana Bergant is a developer with 19 years, experience in full-stack web development. She has a track record of delivering web solutions. Over the last two years, her focus has shifted to online teaching and consulting. Her Udemy account alone has over 12,000 students. Some recommendations from her students include:
"The course takes you immediately into building a chatbot using Dialogflow's functionalities. Then goes more in depth by integrating everything with a Node.js backend, which is what's really needed in real-case professional scenarios. Jana is knowledgeable but also fun and with a great energy, so following the course is easy and never boring. Strongly suggested if you want to start learning chatbot creation."
--AS"I've learned more in a half a day than I did in a week reading through Google's documentation. Well worth the money."
--Jonnie"Thank you for this great course. I now have my own portfolio ready in less than a week. The instructor is amazing. Looking forward to more courses from Jana."
--STShe offers teaching and consulting to local companies and start-ups on every stage of chatbot development. Her chatbot course and Google Assistant actions development course have 12,000 students. Her plan is to publish more courses in the same field and to support her students in every aspect of chatbot development.
Sachin Bhatnagar began dabbling in computer programming and graphics at the age of 14 on a Sinclair Spectrum home computer using the BASIC language. During the early 2000s, Sachin was instrumental in crafting CRM solutions for a prominent internet service provider in India, as well as designing web-based solutions for corporations.
In 2001, Sachin ventured into computer graphics and visual effects training and production. In 2014, Sachin went back to his first love – coding, and launched a series of online training programs on the subject, and still continues to do so. His online course on chatbots is highly rated and he also consults professionally on the subject, as well as on cloud computing solutions.
From developing world class curriculum to imparting training to over five thousand students in the classroom and over twelve thousand online, Sachin has been instrumental in fueling innovation, creating brand identities, and crafting world class technology solutions for companies and individuals alike.
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Preface
The world of conversational design opened up to me over two years ago, when my company shifted from Mobile to Voice. We were fortunate to be one of the first companies to recognize that oice is going to take over our interaction mediums, and that businesses will have to react fast to the conversational revolution that has just emerged.
And indeed, today, we can say that conversational interactions, whether through chat or voice, are changing the way we live and do business, offering an efficient, focused, and cost-effective solution that suits our needs.
However, conversational design didn't just "appear" into our lives. It is the evolution of a long human-machine communication history, in which with every step we take, we get closer and closer to naturally humanized interaction with computers.
In this book, I will highlight some of the main components of conversational design, while distinguishing between chat and voice interfaces. Although I do refer to the technicalities behind building conversational solutions, I chose to focus on the challenge of designing a successful conversational interaction that will be natural, comprehensive, and supportive of users' needs.
The world of conversational design is very dynamic and it evolves constantly. In fact, as I was writing this book, I needed to go back and update some of the chapters to keep the information up to date.
However, this is also what makes this technology so interesting and unique. We are in the midst of a revolution, and we are a main part of it, Conversational designers, developers, device-builders, and vendors are all shaping the way conversational design will be in the next decade. There is a lot to innovate, to accomplish and achieve, and as pioneers in this market, we can all make a difference and leave a mark.
Writing this book, I wanted to provide you the readers with an easy-to-use guide to build your first conversational applications. I've included some historical background, provided best practices on what to do and what not to do when building a chat or a voicebot, and incorporated concrete examples designed by some of the leading brands world wide.
I hope you will find this book a useful introduction to the world of conversational design and that it will inspire you to build and create new and improved experiences of human-machine interaction.
Who this book is for
This book requires a general understanding of UI building, but the coding level is kept fairly simple: a basic grasp of markup languages and JavaScript will suffice. No in-depth knowledge of Artificial Intelligence is required, except for basic concepts. Knowledge of Natural Language Processing will be helpful, but is not mandatory. Developers and product managers, and even C-level executives, will profit from this book, since it shows them the interactive, expressive side of conversational AI. It is impossible to understand modern NLP and AI products without this.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Conversational UI is our Future, addresses the concept of conversational UIs by exploring what they are, how they evolved, their challenges, and how they will develop in the future. The chapter gives a timeline of how UI has developed over the years and the difference between voice control chatbots, virtual assistants, and conversational solutions.
Chapter 2, How Not to Build Your Next Chat and Voicebots, discusses and analyzes the requirements for building a conversational application, by looking into bad examples and use cases. Sometimes, knowing what not to do, is more worthy than knowing what you should do.
Chapter 3, Building a Killer Conversational App, provides five tips for making a conversational application successful. Those tips are backed up by some chat and voice examples.
Chapter 4, Designing for Amazon Alexa and Google Home, takes a deep dive into the design of conversational solutions by looking at the two leading voice-enabled solutions, Amazon Alexa and Google Home. This chapter reviews both technical and voice UX recommendations and offers examples.
Chapter 5, Designing a Facebook Messenger Chatbot, discusses the structure of the Facebook Messenger platform, its advantages, and disadvantages. This chapter includes a tutorial on how to build a FB Messenger bot using its internal tools and discusses other tools that are commonly used by developers in the market.
Chapter 6, Contextual Design – Can We Make a Bot Feel More Human?, tackles the challenge of creating and building contextual conversation –one of the greatest obstacles that businesses and developers face today. In this chapter, we will learn about contextual design and provide a few recommendations on how to achieve it.
Chapter 7, Building Personalities Your Bot Can Be a Better Human, touches on the importance of the personality of your bot, and gives guidance on how to choose it and what it should reflect when it's interacting with your clients
Chapter 8, A View into Vertical-Specific Bots – Financial Institutions, looks at bots in the financial sector and their unique components.
Chapter 9, Travel and Commerce Bot – Use cases and Implementation, the challenges of travel and eommerce bots, and learning from real use cases and implementations by some leading industry players.
Chapter 10, Conversational Design Project – A Step-By-Step Guide, guides the reader through using all the concepts discussed in the book and implementing them in their first conversational application.
Chapter 11, Summary, recaps what has been discussed throughout this book and provides insights into the future of conversational design.
To get the most out of this book
To get the most out of this book, I suggest trying to gain experience with as many conversational applications as you can. Try and experiment with chatbots on various websites and on Facebook Messenger. If you have access to an Alexa device or Google Home, try to use some of the trending skills and analyze their shortfalls and successes. If you don't have either of those devices, use the Google Assistant on your mobile phone (you can download it on iPhone as well).
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Conventions used
There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.
Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, also appear in the text like this. For example: "Select System info from the Administration panel."
Note
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Tip
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Chapter 1. Conversational UI is our Future
Conversational user interface (UI) is changing the way that we interact. Intelligent assistants, chatbots, and voice-enabled devices, such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home, offer a new, natural, and intuitive human-machine interaction and open up a whole new world for us as humans. Chatbots and voicebots ease, speed up, and improve daily tasks. They increase our efficiency and, compared to humans, they are also very cost-effective for the businesses employing them.
This chapter will address the concept of conversational UIs by initially exploring what they are, how they evolved, what they offer, their challenges, and how they will develop in the future. The chapter provides an introduction to the conversational world. We will take a look at how UI has developed over the years and the difference between voice control, chatbots, virtual assistants and conversational solutions.
What is conversational UI?
Broadly speaking, conversational UI is a new form of interaction with computers that tries to mimic a "natural human conversation." To understand what this means, we can turn to the good old Oxford Dictionary and search for the definition of a conversation:
con·ver·sa·tion
/ˌkänvərˈsāSH(ə)n/ noun
A talk, especially an informal one, between two or more people, in which news and ideas are exchanged.
On Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversation), I found some interesting additions. There, conversation is defined a little more broadly: "An interactive communication between two or more people… the development of conversational skills and etiquette is an important part of socialization."
The development of conversational skills in a new language is a frequent focus of language teaching and learning. If we sum up the two definitions, we can agree that a conversation must be:
Now if we go back to our definition of conversational UI, we can easily identify the gaps between the classic definition of a conversation and what we define today as conversational UI.
Conversational UI, as opposed to the preceding definition:
The gaps that we identified above represent the future evolution of conversational UI. While it seems like there is a long way to go for us to actually be able to truly replace human-to-human interaction, with today's and future technologies, those gaps will close sooner than we think. However, let's start by taking a look at how human-computer interaction evolved over the last 50 years, before we try to predict the future.
The evolution of conversational UI
Conversational UI is part of a long evolution of human-machine interaction. The interface of this communication has evolved tremendously over the years, mostly thanks to technology improvements, but also through the imagination and vision of humans.
Science fiction books and movies predicted different forms of humanized interaction with machines for decades (some of the best-known examples are Star Wars, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Star Trek), however, computing power was extremely scarce and expensive, so investing in this resource on UIs wasn't a high priority. Today, when our smartphones use more computing power than a supercomputer did in the past, the development of human-machine interaction is much more natural and intuitive. In this chapter, we will review the evolution of computer UI, from the textual through to the graphical and all the way to the conversational UI.
Textual interface
For many years, a textual interface was the only way to interact with computers. The textual interface used commands with a strict format and evolved into free natural language text.
Figure 1: A simple textual interaction based on commands
A good example of a common use of textual interaction is search engines. Today, if I type a sentence such as search for a hotel in NYC on Google or Bing (or any other search engine for that matter), the search engine will provide me with a list of relevant hotels in NYC.
Figure 2: Modern textual UI: Google's search engine
Graphical user interface (GUI)
A later evolution of human-machine interface was the GUI. This interface mimics the way that we perform mechanical tasks in "real life" and replaces the textual interaction.
Figure 3: The GUI mimicking real-life actions
With this interface, for example, to enable/disable an action or specific capability, we will click a button on a screen, using a mouse (instead of writing a textual command line), mimicking a mechanical action of turning on or off a real device.
Figure 4: Microsoft Word is changing the way we interact with personal computers
The GUI became extremely popular during the 90s, with the introduction of Microsoft Windows, which became the most popular operating system for personal computers. The following evolution of GUIs came with the introduction of touchscreen devices, which eliminated the need for mediators, such as the mouse, and provided a more direct and natural way of interacting with a computer.
Figure 5: Touchscreens are eliminating the mouse
Figure 6: Touchscreens allow scrolling and clicking, mimicking manual actions
Conversational UI
The latest evolution of computer-human interaction is the conversational UI. As defined above, a conversational interaction is a new form of communication between humans and machines that includes a series of questions and answers, if not an actual exchange of thoughts.
Figure 7: The CNN Facebook Messenger chatbot
In the conversational interface, we experience, once again, a form of two-sided communication, where the user asks a question and the computer will respond with an answer. In many ways, this is similar to the textual interface we introduced earlier (see the example of the search engine), however, in this case, the end user is not searching for information on the internet but is instead interacting in a one-to-one format with someone who delivers the answer. That someone is a humanized-computer entity called a bot.
The conversational UI mimics a text/voice interaction with a friend/service provider. Though still not a true conversation as defined in the Oxford Dictionary, it provides a free and natural experience that gets the closest to a human-human interaction that we have seen yet.
Figure 8: The Expedia Facebook Messenger chatbot
Voice-enabled conversational UI
A sub-category in the field of conversational UI is voice-enabled conversational UI. Whereas the shift from textual to GUI and then from GUI to conversational is defined as evolution, conversational voice interaction is a full paradigm shift. This new way to interact with machines, using nothing but our voice – our most basic communication and expression tool – takes human-machine relationships to a whole new level.
Computers are now capable of recognizing our voice, "understanding" our requests, responding back, and even replying with suggestions and recommendations. Being a natural interaction method for humans, voice makes it easy for young people and adults to engage with computers, in a limit-free environment.
Figure 9: Amazon Alexa and Google Home are voice-enabled devices that facilitate conversational interactions between humans and machines
The stack of conversational UI
The building blocks required to develop a modern and interactive conversational application include:
In this section, we will walk through the "journey" of a conversational interaction along the conversational stack.
Figure 10: The conversational stack: voice recognition, NLU, and context
Voice recognition technology
Voice recognition (also known as speech recognition or speech-to-text) transcribes voice into text. The computer captures our voice with a microphone and provides a text transcription of the words. Using a simple level of text processing, we can develop a voice control feature with simple commands, such as "turn left" or "call John." Leading providers of speech recognition today include Nuance, Amazon, IBM Watson, Google, Microsoft, and Apple.
NLU
To achieve a higher level of understanding, beyond simple commands, we must include a layer of NLU. NLU fulfills the task of reading comprehension. The computer "reads the text" (in a voicebot, it will be the transcribed text from the speech recognition) and then tries to grasp the user's intent behind it and translate it into concrete steps.
Lets take a look at travel bot, as an example. The system identifies two individual intentions:
When a user asks to book a flight, the NLU layer is what helps the bot to understand
