How to build a chatbot
Course overview
Many messaging platforms now have their open APIs for integrating developers’ custom applications that are able to communicate with the user via text messages. It opened a great variety of possibilities for reaching out to clients or even simply having some fun in the chat. And that is all the subject of automation - more and more tedious tasks that are too boring for humans can now be automated. Thanks to chatbots, the automators of textual communication, such communicative tasks as customer support, Q&As, polling, or even project or personal management (this is what we will implement by the way) does not require human interference anymore. The applications are abundant in all fields - marketing, sales force, support, inner operations, advertising, entertainment, and the list goes on. Thus, it comes as no surprise that this trend would attract novice and seasoned developers and entrepreneurs alike, creating the need for some kind of source of learning material (which is at current state unfortunately is ).
This course is developed exactly in response to these demands and exactly for the people who are eager to jump start with bots. The material is organized into week loads and provides comprehensive overview of concepts and abstractions, as well as some in-depth (adequately in-depth) glance onto concrete tools and frameworks to work with - but don’t be afraid as the technologies are really transparent and your knowledge will be applicable to other frameworks and tools just the same.
What you'll learn
You will get to know:
- main abstractions and metaphors that bot applications utilize, the general architecture and structure of bots.
- all in and outs of how bots operate - how the bot understands what user wants for them and how it finds the right answer; how it can be done in different ways.
- overview of the existing tools, how they differ, what to choose, is the going all from scratch an option.
- how to build simple bots with Botkit framework.
- how to hook up NLP platforms to the bot, how they work, and what is the deal with them at all!!! Some tips and tricks of how to optimize the bot, how to use persistent storage for their knowledge base, how to better organize the code and make it extensible, how to deploy it to somewhere. (Heroku, maybe?)
Finally, You will get to build your own first bot that will be your personal assistant in your journey of development progresses on different projects! It will be keeping the track of tasks and deadlines, giving out reminders, and managing priorities for yours! It is going to be pretty awesome!
Syllabus
WEEK 1. Intro to Chatbots and Conversational Artificial Intelligence. Main concepts.Trends
WEEK 2. Building simple Chatbot with Botkit Framework
WEEK 3. Advanced topics. NLP platforms
WEEK 4. Final touches. Code organization. Storage. Deployment