Chatbots for eCommerce:

Learn how to build a virtual shopping assistant

by Amit Kolthari, Rania Zyane, and Joshua Hoover

"The content curation and compilation is good. It reduces the learner's research time. Everything is put together in a wonderful way." - Hari Vignesh, software developer

If you are a developer interested in learning how to build your own conversational bot from scratch, this book is for you. Upon completion of this book you will be able to build a text-based Facebook Messenger bot and a voice-based custom skill for Amazon’s Alexa Voice Service.

In the first chapter, you learn about the conversational interface, its history, and why it’s gaining in popularity again. In the next few chapters you will build a virtual shopping assistant bot using the Facebook Messenger Platform. You’ll start with the basics and then work your way up to build a truly conversational bot that users can interact with using natural language. In the final chapter you go step-by-step, building a custom skill for the Alexa Voice Service.

"There are good web resources (e.g. api.ai) on how to create bots, but this book is a great summarization and all-in-one place to get this information." -David Urbansky Ph.d Computer Science (focus on semantics, search, and web information retrieval)