front matter
I’ve been a software developer and architect for 18 years, with half of that time spent building artificial intelligence solutions. I’ve built several conversational AI solutions and various other AI assistants. In those 18 years, I’ve read and learned from more books, blogs, and podcasts than I can count. I’m excited to give back by producing original content of my own. I like to say that I’ve been standing on the shoulders of giants for long enough now; I’d like to be a giant for someone else. I look forward to hearing about the wonderful solutions that readers of this book are going to build.
In this book, I will walk you through all aspects of building, designing, training, testing, and improving an AI assistant, with a primary focus on conversational AI. This book includes several hard lessons I’ve learned along the way and shared with you so that you don’t have to make the same mistakes.
When I first learned about conversational AIs, I assumed that they were just a handful of dialogue rules sprinkled on top of a machine learning algorithm. I’ve come to appreciate that there is so much more to building an AI assistant than that.