What this book covers
Chapter 1, Conversational UI is our Future, addresses the concept of conversational UIs by exploring what they are, how they evolved, their challenges, and how they will develop in the future. The chapter gives a timeline of how UI has developed over the years and the difference between voice control chatbots, virtual assistants, and conversational solutions.
Chapter 2, How Not to Build Your Next Chat and Voicebots, discusses and analyzes the requirements for building a conversational application, by looking into bad examples and use cases. Sometimes, knowing what not to do, is more worthy than knowing what you should do.
Chapter 3, Building a Killer Conversational App, provides five tips for making a conversational application successful. Those tips are backed up by some chat and voice examples.
Chapter 4, Designing for Amazon Alexa and Google Home, takes a deep dive into the design of conversational solutions by looking at the two leading voice-enabled solutions, Amazon Alexa and Google Home. This chapter reviews both technical and voice UX recommendations and offers examples.
Chapter 5, Designing a Facebook Messenger Chatbot, discusses the structure of the Facebook Messenger platform, its advantages, and disadvantages. This chapter includes a tutorial on how to build a FB Messenger bot using its internal tools and discusses other tools that are commonly used by developers in the market.
Chapter 6, Contextual Design – Can We Make a Bot Feel More Human?, tackles the challenge of creating and building contextual conversation –one of the greatest obstacles that businesses and developers face today. In this chapter, we will learn about contextual design and provide a few recommendations on how to achieve it.
Chapter 7, Building Personalities Your Bot Can Be a Better Human, touches on the importance of the personality of your bot, and gives guidance on how to choose it and what it should reflect when it's interacting with your clients
Chapter 8, A View into Vertical-Specific Bots – Financial Institutions, looks at bots in the financial sector and their unique components.
Chapter 9, Travel and Commerce Bot – Use cases and Implementation, the challenges of travel and eommerce bots, and learning from real use cases and implementations by some leading industry players.
Chapter 10, Conversational Design Project – A Step-By-Step Guide, guides the reader through using all the concepts discussed in the book and implementing them in their first conversational application.
Chapter 11, Summary, recaps what has been discussed throughout this book and provides insights into the future of conversational design.