book

Conversational AI

Name: Conversational AI
Author: Andrew Freed
ISBN: 9781617298837

by Andrew Freed

October 2021

Intermediate to advanced

320 pages

9h 21m

English

Manning Publications

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inside front cover
Conversational AI
Copyright
dedication
brief contents
contents
front matter
prefaceacknowledgmentsabout this bookWho should read this bookHow this book is organized: A roadmapAbout the codeliveBook discussion forumOther online resourcesabout the authorabout the cover illustration
Part 1. Foundations
1 Introduction to conversational AI
1.1 Introduction to AI assistants and their platforms1.1.1 Types of AI assistants1.1.2 A snapshot of AI assistant platforms1.2 Primary use cases for AI assistant technology1.2.1 Self-service assistant1.2.2 Agent assist1.2.3 Classification and routing1.3 Follow along with this book1.3.1 What you need to create your assistant1.3.2 Useful spreadsheet software1.3.3 Recommended programming language and code repositorySummary
2 Building your first conversational AI
2.1 Building a conversational AI for Fictitious Inc.2.2 What’s the user’s intent?2.2.1 What’s an utterance?2.2.2 What’s a response?2.2.3 How does the assistant understand what the user means?2.2.4 Why machine learning?2.2.5 What’s an intent?2.2.6 What’s an entity?2.2.7 Combining intents and entities2.2.8 intents to the Fictitious Inc. assistant2.3 Responding to the user2.3.1 Simple question-and-answer responses2.3.2 Contextualizing a response by using entities2.3.3 An alternative way to provide contextual responses2.3.4 Responding with a process flow2.4 Other useful responses2.4.1 Detecting low confidence2.4.2 Counting misunderstandings2.4.3 Implementing confidence detection and the two-strikes rule2.5 Try to build this conversational AI yourselfSummary

Part 2. Designing for success
3 Designing effective processes
3.1 What processes will the assistant handle?3.1.1 Designing for the most common user needs3.1.2 Assembling a plan and a dream team3.1.3 Managing the design process3.1.4 Cross-cutting design aspects3.2 Choosing the channel to implement first3.2.1 How users receive information in voice and web3.2.2 How the assistant receives information in voice and webSummary
4 Designing effective dialogue
4.1 Writing dialogue4.1.1 Take a conversational tone4.1.2 Don’t repeat yourself (much)4.1.3 Acknowledge the user4.2 Asking questions4.3 What if the assistant doesn’t understand?4.3.1 Reprompting4.3.2 Disambiguation4.3.3 EscalationSummary
5 Building a successful AI assistant
5.1 AI assistant use cases5.2 Conversational AI success metrics5.2.1 Containment5.2.2 Time to resolution5.2.3 Net promoter score5.2.4 Coverage5.2.5 Instrumenting your conversational AI5.3 Command interpreter success metrics5.3.1 Usage5.3.2 Stickiness5.3.3 Instrumenting your command interpreter5.4 Event classifier success metrics5.4.1 Time to resolution5.4.2 Number of hand-offs5.4.3 Other customer satisfaction metrics5.4.4 Instrumenting your classifierSummary
Part 3. Training and testing
6 Training your assistant
6.1 Training an AI assistant6.2 Finding training data6.2.1 Production logs6.2.2 A mock user interface6.2.3 Subject-matter experts6.2.4 Organizing training data into intents6.3 Assessing whether you have the right training data6.3.1 Training data variety6.3.2 Training data volume6.3.3 Training data veracitySummary
7 How accurate is your assistant?
7.1 Testing an AI assistant for accuracy7.1.1 Testing a single utterance7.1.2 Testing multiple utterances7.1.3 Selecting a test data set7.2 Comparing testing methodologies7.2.1 Blind testing7.2.2 k-folds cross-validation test7.3 Selecting the right accuracy metric for the jobSummary
8 Testing your dialogue flows
8.1 Functionally testing a dialogue flow8.1.1 Manually testing a conversation flow8.1.2 Automating a conversation flow test8.1.3 Testing the dialogue flowchart8.1.4 Testing the unexpected error paths8.2 Nonfunctionally testing a dialogue flow8.2.1 User experience testing8.2.2 Load testingSummary
Part 4. Maintenance
9 Deployment and management
9.1 Where to store your code9.1.1 Taking the Wild West approach9.1.2 Using source control for code9.2 Where to run your code9.2.1 Development environment9.2.2 Test environment9.2.3 Production environment9.2.4 After the first production deployment9.3 Using source control for other assetsSummary
10 Improving your assistant
10.1 Using a success metric to determine where to start improvements10.1.1 Improving the first flow to fix containment problems10.1.2 Inspecting other process flows for containment problems10.2 Analyzing the classifier to predict future containment problems10.2.1 Representative baseline10.2.2 Finding gaps in the training data10.3 When and why to improve your assistant10.3.1 You can’t fix everything at once10.3.2 You can’t always predict how users will react10.3.3 User needs will change10.3.4 Not every problem is technicalSummary
Part 5. Advanced/optional topics
11 Building your own classifier
11.1 Why build your own classifier?11.1.1 Classification is a differentiator11.1.2 Classification is a core competency11.1.3 Traceability11.1.4 To learn11.1.5 Build or buy?11.2 Build a simple classifier from first principles11.2.1 The simplest text classifier11.2.2 The mathematics behind a simple classifier11.3 Expanding the simple classifier11.3.1 Predicting more than one class11.3.2 An all-in-one classifier11.3.3 Comparing binary classifiers to all-in-one classifiers11.4 Extending even further11.4.1 What happens when you add more training data?11.4.2 Exercise: Experiment on your ownSummary
12 Additional training for voice assistants
12.1 Collecting data to test a speech-to-text model12.1.1 Call recordings as speech training data12.1.2 Generating synthetic speech data12.2 Testing the speech-to-text model12.2.1 Word error rate12.2.2 Intent error rate12.2.3 Sentence error rate12.3 Training a speech-to-text model12.3.1 Custom training with a language model12.3.2 Custom training with an acoustic model12.3.3 Custom training with grammarsSummary
Appendix. Glossary of terms and abbreviations
index
inside back cover

Overview

Design, develop, and deploy human-like AI solutions that chat with your customers, solve their problems, and streamline your support services.

In Conversational AI, you will learn how to:

Pick the right AI assistant type and channel for your needs
Write dialog with intentional tone and specificity
Train your AI’s classifier from the ground up
Create question-and-direct-response AI assistants
Design and optimize a process flow for web and voice
Test your assistant’s accuracy and plan out improvements

Conversational AI: Chatbots that work teaches you to create the kind of AI-enabled assistants that are revolutionizing the customer service industry. You’ll learn to build effective conversational AI that can automate common inquiries and easily address your customers' most common problems. This engaging and entertaining book delivers the essential technical and creative skills for designing successful AI solutions, from coding process flows and training machine learning, to improving your written dialog.

About the Technology
Create AI-driven chatbots and other intelligent agents that humans actually enjoy talking to! Adding intelligence to automated response systems saves time and money for you and your customers. Conversational AI systems excel at routine tasks such as answering common questions, classifying issues, and routing customers to the appropriate human staff. This book will show you how to build effective, production-ready AI assistants.

About the Book
Conversational AI is a guide to creating AI-driven voice and text agents for customer support and other conversational tasks. This practical and entertaining book combines design theory with techniques for building and training AI systems. In it, you’ll learn how to find training data, assess performance, and write dialog that sounds human. You’ll go from building simple chatbots to designing the voice assistant for a complete call center.

What's Inside

Pick the right AI for your needs
Train your AI classifier
Create question-and-direct-response assistants
Design and optimize a process flow

About the Reader
For software developers. Examples use Watson Assistant and Python.

About the Author
Andrew R. Freed is a Master Inventor and Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM. He has worked in AI solutions since 2012.

Quotes
A thorough guide to the entire process of designing and implementing virtual assistants. Goes way beyond the technicalities.
- Maxim Volgin, KLM

All you need to know about building your own virtual assistant.
- Fernando Antonio da Silva Bernardino, Transferwise

Learn how to build virtual assistants in all platforms; IBM Watson, but also Azure and AWS.
- Jose Luis Perez, PolyhedraTech

All the steps for developing a real-world virtual assistant without overwhelming you with complex technical details.
- Sowmya Vajjala, National Research Council, Canada

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