"Do you want to learn how to creat your own virtual agent? If so, have I got the book for you!" - Thomas Joseph Heiman

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

Creating Virtual Assistants: Chatbots that work teaches you to create the kind of AI-enabled chatbots 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.

In Creating Virtual Assistants, you will learn how to:

Pick the right virtual assistant type and channel for your needs

Write dialog with intentional tone and specificity

Train a virtual assistant classifier from the ground up

Create question-and-direct-response assistants

Design and optimize a process flow for web and voice

Test your assistant's accuracy and plan out improvements

This engaging and entertaining book delivers the essential technical and creative skills for designing successful virtual assistants, from coding process flows and training machine learning, to improving your written dialog.

about the technology

Virtual assistants multiply the effectiveness of customer-facing communication. Great chatbots automate common tasks like gathering information, responding to questions, and improving product selections so human staff can work on more challenging problems. These powerful tools range from event classifiers that can act on an email message to conversational assistants that actually talk to your users!

about the book

Creating Virtual Assistants is a hands-on guide to building custom virtual assistants for a wide variety of use cases. You'll dive right into developing an assistant capable of identifying top user requests and making a suitable response for each request type.

Once you've got the basics, you'll master a multi-step process flow that can be easily adapted for both text and voice assistants. You'll learn how to hone your assistant by writing better dialog, training and improving its underlying machine learning, and spotting issues like abandonment and underperformance. By the time you're done, you'll be ready to deploy anything from a simple chatbot to a complex call center tool.

about the reader

For software developers. Examples in Watson Assistant and in Python.

about the author

Andrew R. Freed is a Master Inventor and Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM. He's the co-host of the AI Zen podcast. Andrew has extensive experience deploying high-volume virtual assistants and has been working in AI solutions since 2012.