Introduction to Conversational AI

Now we will be designing a chatbot NLU pipeline with spaCy and TensorFlow. You'll learn the NLU techniques for extracting meaning from multiturn chatbot-user interactions. By learning and applying these techniques, you'll take a step into conversational AI development.

Before diving into the technical details, there's one fundamental question: what is a chatbot? Where can we find one? What exactly does conversational AI mean?

Conversational artificial intelligence (conversational AI) is a field of machine learning that aims to create technology that enables users to have text- or speech-based interactions with machines. Chatbots, virtual assistants, and voice assistants are typical conversational AI products.

A chatbot is a software application that is designed to make conversations with humans in chat applications. Chatbots are popular in a wide variety of commercial areas, including HR, marketing and sales, banking, and healthcare, as well as in personal, non-commercial areas, such as small talk. Many commercial companies, such as Sephora (Sephora owns two chatbots—a virtual make-up artist chatbot on the Facebook messenger platform and a customer service chatbot again on Facebook messenger), IKEA (IKEA have a customer service chatbot called Anna), AccuWeather, and many more, own customer service and FAQ chatbots.