Building Intelligent, Cross-platform, Messaging Bots

by Michael Yuan

Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Slack are all investing heavily in intelligent bots, providing tools and platforms for building apps that serve users via natural conversation. Now, there's a practical guide to chatbot programming on these exciting new all the knowledge you need to start creating real solutions, and get ahead of the curve as the tools evolve and mature. Software development expert and entrepreneur Michael Yuan begins by introducing the powerful business case for chatbots and "Conversation as a Platform (CaaP)" Next, he introduces several pivotal technologies, including Facebook's Messenger; Slack's Hubot bot platform and its PHP-and-Java backend; Amazon's Alexa; and Microsoft's eagerly-anticipated Skype / Cortana bot platform. You'll learn how each of these platforms works, and how to use current tools to begin creating your own chatbot applications. Yuan covers key issues ranging from social media integration to scripted conversations, natural language enhancement, AI-based conversation, and conversation design -- even the use of humor and human scriptwriters. He also introduces a powerful framework for abstracting away native "glue code," so it's easier to move among platforms or write code for several of them at once.

320 pages, Paperback

Published February 19, 2018