Daniel Pritchett - Build Chatbot Interactions: Responsive, Intuitive Interfaces with Ruby

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Welcome to Build Chatbot Interactions .

Chat is a compelling and accessible medium, and its everywheremobile phones, tablets, computers, you name it. It keeps us connected, and its endlessly programmable. Theres room for creativity, convenience, wonder, and excitement.

Chat includes dialog like:

• Hi, how have you been?
• Are you free for lunch tomorrow?
• Show me another funny picture.
• Find me some tickets to NYC for next Friday.

A chatbot is a program that exists where users already hang outin chat rooms and messaging programs. Thanks to chatbots, users dont have to scroll through endless pages or links looking for what they want. Instead, chatbots offer smaller, back-and-forth interactions with a conversational style. You ask the chatbot a question, and it gives you an answer. This type of interaction is more personalized and provides the user with immediate, focused assistance.

The classic chatbot style is a single user in a chat room that has a specific name, like Eliza, Bob, or Computer. The bot youll work with in this book is named Lita after the Ruby-based chatbot building framework youll learn to use. This particular user is available 24/7 to answer certain types of questions and perform known tasks . These known tasks are referred to as chatbot skills and are the primary focus of this book.

A chatbot skill is a bit of code that responds to a specific question with a relevant answer. Heres an example:

You: Lita, show me a picture of my dog

The bot: Ok, heres one! http://instagram.com/fake-photo-url.jpg

If you break it down into a few components, it looks something like this:

• The end user supplies a specific plain-text question or command.
• The bot performs a relevant programmable action to fulfill the end users wish.
• The bot responds in plain text.

In this book, youll walk through the design and implementation of your own chatbot skills, and youll deploy these skills as always-online services that you can use as you see fit.