Let's get started. To create an account with Chatfuel, go to https://chatfuel.com: 

Click GET STARTED FOR FREE. Remember, the Chatfuel toolkit is currently free to use. This will lead you to one of the following two options:

• If you are logged into Facebook, it will ask for permission to link your Chatfuel account to your Facebook account
• If you are not logged in, it will ask you to log into Facebook first before asking for permission

Chatfuel links to Facebook to deploy bots. So it requires permission to use your Facebook account:

Authorize Chatfuel to receive information about you and to be your Pages manager:

That's it! You are all set to build your very first bot:

Chatfuel bots can be published on two deployment platforms: Facebook Messenger and Telegram. Let us build a chatbot for Facebook Messenger first. In order to do that, we need to create a Facebook Page. Every chatbot on Facebook Messenger needs to be attached to a page. Here is how we can build a Facebook Page:

1. Go to https://www.facebook.com/pages/create/.
2. Click the category appropriate to the page content. In our case, we will use Brand or Product and choose App Page. 
3. Give the page a name. In our case, let's use Get_Around_Edinburgh. Note that Facebook does not make it easy to change page names. So choose wisely.
4. Once the page is created, you will see Chatfuel asking for permission to connect to the page:

5. Click CONNECT TO PAGE. You will be taken to the bot editor.
6. The name of the bot is set to My First Bot. It has a Messenger...

Before we move on to build our bot, let's look at the basic building blocks:

• Blocks
• Cards
• Buttons
• Plugins
• Attributes

Go back to the editor and look at the Bot Structure tab. Under Bot Structure, you will find two types of blocks—built-in and user-defined. Welcome message and Default answer are the two built-in blocks. We will be building user-defined blocks to implement the conversation capability of the chatbot. Each block can be thought of as a response segment of the chatbot. Each block can contain one or more cards.

There are two blocks that are predefined—Welcome message and Default message. Welcome message comes along with a default card with the welcome text in it. The welcome block is triggered when the user first encounters the chatbot. On Facebook Messenger, this is triggered when the user hits the Get Started button. The default answer block is triggered when the bot does not know how to handle a user's input message. Try saying hello to the bot on Facebook Messenger and see how it responds:

Now that we have brushed up on the basics, let's start building our bot: 

1. On the welcome block, click the default text and edit it.  Hovering the mouse around the block can reveal options such as deleting the card, rearranging the order of the cards, and adding new cards between existing cards. Delete the Main menu button:

2. Add a Text card. Let's add a follow-up text card and ask the user a question. 
3. Add buttons for user responses. Click ADD BUTTON and type in the name of the button. Ignore block names for now. Since they are incomplete, they will appear in red. Remember, you can add up to three buttons to a text card:

4. Button responses need to be tied to blocks so that when users hit a button the chatbot would know what to do or say. Let's add a few blocks. To add a new block, click ADD BLOCK in the Bot Structure...

Besides text, there are other types of cards that can be used to deliver content. These cards are also specific to the delivery platform. Only some platforms, such as Facebook Messenger, support advanced cards such as carousels. Let's examine the types of cards available to us.

To add an image card, click the Image icon under ADD A CARD. Click Upload Image, and choose an image file:

You can send audio files over chat that can be instantly played by the user. To send an audio file, click the + icon at the end of ADD A CARD ...

How can the user and the chatbot navigate through the conversation? How do they respond to each other and move the conversation forward? In this section, we will examine the devices to facilitate conversation flow.

Buttons are a way to let users respond to the chatbot in an unambiguous manner. You can add buttons to text, gallery, and list cards. Buttons have a label and a payload. The label is what the user gets to see. Payload is what happens in the backend when the user clicks the button:

A button can take one of four types of payloads: next block, URL, phone number, or share. The next block is identified by the name of the block. This will tell the chatbot which block to execute when the button is pressed...

In any conversation, the context of conversation needs to be managed. Context can be maintained by creating a local cache where the information transferred between the two dialogue partners can be stored. For instance, the user may tell the chatbot their food preferences, and this information can be stored in context for future reference if not used immediately. Another instance is in a conversation where the user is asking questions about a story. These questions may be incomplete and may need to be interpreted in terms of the information available in the context. 

In this section, we will explore how context can be recorded and utilized during the conversation in Chatfuel. Let's take the task of finding a restaurant as part of your tour guide chatbot. The conversation between the chatbot and the user might go as follows:

User : Find a restaurant...

So far, we have seen how the conversational flow happens using buttons. In each case, the user has to press a button or type in information to fill in a slot, which makes the conversation progress. However, it is possible to have users initiate conversation and navigate using natural language (NL) input as well in Chatfuel. In this section, we will explore how to make the chatbot understand the user's natural language inputs and take action.

Alongside the Welcome message block, there is a Default answer block. This block is used by the chatbot as response to any input from the user that it does not understand. Go ahead and change the contents of the block as follows:

Now test...

Conversational tasks usually need to be backed up by backend tasks. For instance, booking a table in a restaurant is not just a conversation, it also involves the action of booking a table. This is a backend task where the information concerning the booking is sent over to a booking server as an HTTP request. In this section, we will explore how to use the JSON API card to enable backend tasks.

Before we start using a JSON API card, we need a URL that can take a few parameters and carry out a backend task. Let's build a dummy backend service that can book a table given the restaurant name, number of people, and the time. To do this, we have to build a Node.js web app and host it on the cloud:

1. Create a directory called Eddie-bot. In this directory, we need three files: index.js, package.json, and Procfile.
2. Create the package file, package.json, which...

Another interesting feature provided by Chatfuel is the ability send messages to more than one user at any time. This is a facility that you can use to restart conversations with the user or send notifications periodically. To use this feature, click the Broadcast option in the main menu:

You will see four options. Let's select DELIVER YOUR MESSAGE NOW. There are three things to do—compose a message to send, choose users, and hit SEND:

Click USER FILTER to choose a subset of users you want to send the message to. This is done using variables and values. For instance, you can choose to send the message to all users who said that they love Indian cuisine (that is, {{restaurant_cuisine}} = 'Indian') and that they are in the Old Town ({{restaurant_location}} = 'Old town'). This a message can be a discount offer at an Indian...

Chatbots can be built from templates. These are basic pre-designed chatbots that can be readily edited and converted into the chatbot that you need. There are a number of templates for you to start with. To do this, go to https://dashboard.chatfuel.com/#/bots. Under the TUTORIAL TEMPLATES section, click View All Templates:

Chatfuel provides a number of templates with a variety of use cases such as restaurants, celebrity assistant, quiz, and e-commerce. Explore them further to learn how the conversation is structured and how various tools have been used to support those conversations.

Chatfuel also provides analytics on your chatbot. To access the analytics, go to your chatbot's dashboard and click Analyze in the main menu. The analytics page summarizes the bot's usage statistics in terms of user growth, user activity, and user retention. It also highlights usage patterns, such as the blocks that are popular with users and issues faced by AI in terms of understanding users' language utterances. Finally, it also tells you where in the world your users are coming from.

Congratulations! In this chapter, we embarked on a journey toward building awesome chatbots. I hope, using Chatfuel, you have created your very first bot. Using tour guiding as the use case, we explored a variety of chatbot design and development topics along the way—conversation flow design, blocks, types of message content, navigating through the conversational flow, understanding basic natural language utterances, and many more. We have also learned the various building blocks provided by Chatfuel to build, monitor, and manage chatbots. 

In the following chapters, we will explore using a variety of other use cases and more advanced topics in building chatbots, such as understanding nuances in natural language utterances and managing more complex conversational contexts. 

Chatfuel documentation: http://docs.chatfuel.com/