Introduction to Conversational AI

Like the other chapters in this book, this chapter spans the conceptual aspects as well as pragmatic hands-on building – this time, the domain is Conversational AI. From many reports, it's stated that the conversational AI market will grow more than 30% per year and that the majority of customers, as well as employees, will be interacting with digital assistants.

The challenge in creating responsive, intelligent, and interactive bots is that, for machines, conversation is very hard to achieve. Let's look at the top three reasons why this is the case:

• Conversation conveys only the essential information – most of the information that's derived from a conversation is not even in the conversation. That is because humans have common sense, reasoning, shared context, knowledge, and assumptions at hand. We also overload a conversation with meanings derived from tonality, facial expressions, and even non-verbal communication...