Creating Virtual Assistants: Chatbots that work

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

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.