Build Chatbot Interactions: Responsive, Intuitive Interfaces with Ruby

by Daniel Pritchett

The next step in the evolution of user interfaces is here. Chatbots let your users interact with your service in their own natural language. Use free and open source tools along with Ruby to build creative, useful, and unexpected interactions for users. Take advantage of the Lita framework's step-by-step implementation strategy to simplify bot development and testing. From novices to experts, chatbots are an area in which everyone can participate. Exercise your creativity by creating chatbot skills for communicating, information, and fun.

Developers of all skill levels can craft user experiences that are natural, easy to use, and most of all, fun. Build chatbots using free, open source tools and launch them to popular chat platforms like Slack and Amazon's Alexa. Use the Ruby programming language and the Lita bot framework to unlock fun and powerful chat abilities such as sending text messages and emails, creating new meme images, driving a robot around the room, and talking out loud on a home speaker.

Use frameworks available in Ruby and Node.js to get started quickly. Create simple chatbot skills that respond quickly to basic requests. Chain skills together for more complex interactions. Take advantage of test-driven development techniques to build your bots with confidence. Coordinate tasks with colleagues via bot. Connect with external APIs to provide users with data they need. Extract data information from web pages when an API isn't available. Expand your bot's reach with SMS and e-mail messaging. Deploy a chatbot to a host so users can interact with it on their schedule.

Build a more responsive, easy-to-use interface for your users today.

What You Need:

You don't need much to get started with chatbots. A Mac or Linux computer with a recent version of Ruby is recommended. Windows users can keep up with a free virtual machine running Linux. You'll deploy your chatbots for free (or at least cheaply) on cloud hosting platforms like Heroku and Digital Ocean.

194 pages, Paperback

Published June 4, 2019

About the author

Daniel Pritchett is a consulting programmer, speaker, and user group supporter in the Pensacola, Florida area. He builds infrastructure tooling for internet companies. If it's interesting and useful, Daniel wants to help you build it. If it's also fun, Daniel will buy you a coffee. When he's not at home you'll usually find Daniel walking his dogs, taking his daughter to ballet lessons, or at the gym.

Reviews

[Tobias Pfeiffer · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sadly the first ever PragProg book that I was unhappy with when I finished it.

Maybe it's about expectation management but I expected this book to teach me how to build chat bots, how to design interactions and interfaces well etc.
What I got was a book that showed "ok this is the router and it matches a regex to a method basically" and then I don't know how many projects that use the same concept to query some external API or what not. It feels like at least 60% of the book is spent on... well not chats but API interactions and other general Ruby tasks. NLP isn't even really touched upon.

If you don't know Ruby yet this might be for you, as an experienced ruby dev reading the README of the used framework sadly gives you most of the knowledge of this book.

[Daniel Pritchett]

Writing this book was quite a journey. I hope it brightens someone's day!