Conversational AI: Chatbots That Work - Softcover

Freed, Andrew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1617298832 ISBN 13: 9781617298837

Publisher: Manning Publications, 2021

Synopsis

"Do you want to learn how to creat your own virtual agent? If so, have I got the book for you!" - Thomas Joseph Heiman

Design, develop, and deploy human-like AI solutions that chat with your customers, solve their problems, and streamline your support services.

Creating Virtual Assistants: Chatbots that work teaches you to create the kind of AI-enabled chatbots 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.

In Creating Virtual Assistants, you will learn how to:

Pick the right virtual assistant type and channel for your needs
Write dialog with intentional tone and specificity
Train a virtual assistant classifier from the ground up
Create question-and-direct-response assistants
Design and optimize a process flow for web and voice
Test your assistant's accuracy and plan out improvements

This engaging and entertaining book delivers the essential technical and creative skills for designing successful virtual assistants, from coding process flows and training machine learning, to improving your written dialog.

about the technology
Virtual assistants multiply the effectiveness of customer-facing communication. Great chatbots automate common tasks like gathering information, responding to questions, and improving product selections so human staff can work on more challenging problems. These powerful tools range from event classifiers that can act on an email message to conversational assistants that actually talk to your users!

about the book
Creating Virtual Assistants is a hands-on guide to building custom virtual assistants for a wide variety of use cases. You'll dive right into developing an assistant capable of identifying top user requests and making a suitable response for each request type.

Once you've got the basics, you'll master a multi-step process flow that can be easily adapted for both text and voice assistants. You'll learn how to hone your assistant by writing better dialog, training and improving its underlying machine learning, and spotting issues like abandonment and underperformance. By the time you're done, you'll be ready to deploy anything from a simple chatbot to a complex call center tool.

about the reader
For software developers. Examples in Watson Assistant and in Python.

about the author
Andrew R. Freed is a Master Inventor and Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM. He's the co-host of the AI Zen podcast. Andrew has extensive experience deploying high-volume virtual assistants and has been working in AI solutions since 2012.

About this title

About the Author

Andrew R. Freed is a Master Inventor and Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM. He's the co-host of the AI Zen podcast. Andrew has extensive experience deploying high-volume virtual assistants and has been working in AI solutions since 2012.

 

From the Back Cover

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Manning Publications
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1617298832
• ISBN 13: 9781617298837
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 378