May 2017
Intermediate to advanced
348 pages
7h 53m
English
Content preview from Designing BotsBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 1. What Are Bots?
We come in peace.
—The Day the Earth Stood Still
BOTS ARE THE FUTURE OF SOFTWARE.
Bots are going to disrupt the software industry in the same way the web and mobile revolutions did. History has taught us that great opportunities arise in these revolutions: we’ve seen how successful companies like Uber, Airbnb, and Salesforce were created as a result of new technology, user experience, and distribution channels. At the end of this book I hope you will be better prepared to grab these opportunities and design a great product for this bot revolution.
Our lives have become full of bots in 2017—I wake up in the morning and ask Alexa (a voice bot by Amazon) to play my favorite bossa nova, Amy (an email bot by x.ai) emails me about today’s meetings, and Slackbot (a bot powered by Slack) sends me a notification to remind me to buy airline tickets to NYC today. Bots are everywhere!
There is a lot of talk about bots these days, and a lot of misconceptions. In order to demystify these misconceptions, let’s start by providing some of the history of bots and defining bots—what they do and why they are important.
I wrote my first bot 16 years ago. I was an engineer at a company that provided SMS infrastructure that was about to be deployed in Europe. You can imagine that testing if texting works in a network of one (as the system was not online yet, I was the only one on the network) is a very lonely experience. So I created a small program to answer my texts. It started as ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.