front matter

 

preface

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.

AI assistants are a powerful new technology that allow users to do what they want, when they want to, the way they want to. You use AI assistants every day, from the assistant on a smartphone, to a chatbot or automated voice system, to email systems that sort your incoming mail.

acknowledgments

about this book

Who should read this book

How this book is organized: A roadmap

About the code

liveBook discussion forum

Other online resources

about the author

about the cover illustration