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.

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

Review

"A thorough guide to the entire process of designing and implementing virtual assistants. Goes way beyond the technicalities."

—Maxim Volgin, KLM 

"All you need to know about building your own virtual assistant."

—Fernando Antonio da Silva Bernardino, Transferwise 

"Learn how to build virtual assistants in all platforms; IBM Watson, but also Azure and AWS."

—Jose Luis Perez, PolyhedraTech 

"All the steps for developing a real-world virtual assistant without overwhelming you with complex technical details."

—Sowmya Vajjala, National Research Council, Canada

From the Author

I've been a software developer and architect for 18 years, with half of that time spent building artificial intelligence solutions. In those 18 years, I've read and learned from more books, blogs, and podcasts than I can count. I'm excited to give back by producing original content of my own. I like to say that I've been standing on the shoulders of giants for long enough now; I'd like to be a giant for someone else. I look forward to hearing about the wonderful solutions that readers of this book are going to build.

In this book, I will walk you through all aspects of building, designing, training, testing, and improving a virtual assistant. This book includes several hard lessons I've learned along the way and shared with you so that you don't have to make the same mistakes.

When I first learned about assistants, I assumed that they are just a handful of dialog rules sprinkled on top of a machine learning algorithm. I've come to appreciate that there is so much more to building a virtual assistant than that!

Virtual assistants are a powerful new technology that allow users to do what they want, when they want to, the way they want to. You use virtual assistants every day, from the assistant on a smartphone, to a chatbot or automated voice system, to email systems that sort your incoming mail.

The global COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a trend towards self-service automation through virtual assistants. Now more than ever, companies are looking for ways to increase self-service capability. A common path is to automate routine customer inquiries and free up support staff for higher-value activities.

The book is written from the perspective of FICTITIOUS INC and tells how they have built their first virtual assistant to serve their customer service needs. The book is not tied to a specific virtual assistant platform. The demo in Chapter 2 is built on IBM's Watson Assistant but includes conceptual translations on how to build this assistant in any other platform. The other chapters use generic Python code or pseudocode that can be adapted to your virtual assistant platform of choice. After reading this book you will have a solid foundation in virtual assistants.

Virtual assistants have come a long way since I've started building them. The technology gets better every day. Even so, the basic technology can only take you so far. This book shows you how to make virtual assistant technology work for YOU.