Development: technical and non-technical expertise

Conversational UI opens many opportunities up to non-technical professionals. Voice and chat designers, creatives, data scientists, and persona builders are all responsible for bringing life to a machine-built bot. As a non-developer myself, I know this is a thrilling and rewarding experience.

However, building a bot still requires figuring out the technicalities behind that. I devoted three chapters to the procedures behind building conversational applications for Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and FB Messenger. Even though I deal with this on a daily basis, I still needed the help of some of my colleagues to jump over some fences.

While those platforms do make the effort to offer some tools for non-developers, the capabilities offered by them are very simple and minimal. Some third-party companies try to fill the gap, however, building a complex UX for a bot, with advanced AI capabilities, still requires the cooperation of developers.

That being...