Sam Williams - Hands-On Chatbot Development with Alexa Skills and Amazon Lex: Create custom conversational and voice interfaces for your Amazon Echo devices and web platforms

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Sam Williams qualified with an aerospace engineering master's degree, then became a self-taught software developer while holding down his first job. While traveling, he started to write articles about the tech he was learning about and accrued an audience of readers on Medium and freeCodeCamp.

Currently, Sam works as a lead chatbot developer for the SmartAgent team at MissionLabs, building custom systems for large retailers. His role ensures that he is working with the newest chatbot technologies and is constantly pushing their capabilities.

Walter Quesada is a software engineer and technologist with over 20 years' experience architecting and developing solutions for companies of all sizes. He currently serves as the conversational systems lead at the PwC Applied Research Lab, where he focuses on creating a more conversational future with voice and chatbots. He is also an Amazon Alexa Champion, an OReilly author with a book titled Programming Voice Interfaces, as well as being a Pluralsight instructor with two courses, Developing Alexa Skills for Amazon Echo and Creating Voice and Chatbots that Work Everywhere.

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Chatbots are becoming more and more common in everyday life, with Alexa currently being in 16% of households and over 100,000 Facebook chatbots. Chatbots provide a way to interact with technology that is a lot more natural for people, through conversation.

In this book, we'll learn how to build our own voice and text-based chatbots using Amazon Alexa and Lex. These platforms allow us to use very powerful technology to understand what the users are saying. We also learn about the design process when creating a chatbot and how we can provide a great experience for our users.

This book is for anyone who wants to be able to build Alexa Skills or Lex chatbots. Whether you want to build them for personal projects or as part of your job, this book will give you all the tools you need. You'll be able to take an idea, build the conversation flow diagrams, test them with user stories, and then build your Alexa Skill or Lex chatbot.

, Understanding Chatbots, starts by explaining the concepts involved in building a conversational interface. We will learn how to start with an example user conversation and build flow diagrams to visualize the path that the user takes with the chatbot. The chapter will then discuss the types of chatbots and will introduce us to voice skills for Amazon Alexa and text-based chatbots for Amazon Lex.

, Getting Started with AWS and Amazon CLI , teaches us about AWS Lambdas and how these serverless functions can be built and tested in the browser. After building our first Lambda, we discuss three different ways to build and deploy them, comparing the merits and limits of each. To create the most powerful development environment possible, we use aws-cli to build a script that allows us to deploy Lambdas from our local development environment.

, Understanding Chatbots, to map out our users' interactions with our skill before creating the intents. The Lambdas that we use also increase in complexity with slot eliciting and with the inclusion of data that is stored in S3.