▶Book Description
From touchscreen and mouse-click, we are moving to voice- and conversation-based user interfaces. By adopting Voice User Interfaces (VUIs), you can create a more compelling and engaging experience for your users. Voice User Interface Projects teaches you how to develop voice-enabled applications for desktop, mobile, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
This book explains in detail VUI and its importance, basic design principles of VUI, fundamentals of conversation, and the different voice-enabled applications available in the market. You will learn how to build your first voice-enabled application by utilizing DialogFlow and Alexa's natural language processing (NLP) platform. Once you are comfortable with building voice-enabled applications, you will understand how to dynamically process and respond to the questions by using NodeJS server deployed to the cloud. You will then move on to securing NodeJS RESTful API for DialogFlow and Alexa webhooks, creating unit tests and building voice-enabled podcasts for cars. Last but not the least you will discover advanced topics such as handling sessions, creating custom intents, and extending built-in intents in order to build conversational VUIs that will help engage the users.
By the end of the book, you will have grasped a thorough knowledge of how to design and develop interactive VUIs.
▶What You Will Learn
⦁ Understand NLP platforms with machine learning
⦁ Exploit best practices and user experiences in creating VUI
⦁ Build voice-enabled chatbots
⦁ Host, secure, and test in a cloud platform
⦁ Create voice-enabled applications for personal digital assistant devices
⦁ Develop a virtual assistant for cars
▶Key Features
⦁ Target multiple platforms by creating voice interactions for your applications
⦁ Explore real-world examples of how to produce smart and practical virtual assistants
⦁ Build a virtual assistant for cars using Android Auto in Xamarin
▶Who This Book Is For
Voice User Interface Projects is for you if you are a software engineer who wants to develop voice-enabled applications for your personal digital assistant devices such as Amazon Echo and Google Home, along with your car's virtual assistant systems. Some experience with JavaScript is required.
▶What this book covers
⦁ Chapter 1, Introduction, covers the history of the voice user interfaces (VUIs) and discusses what VUIs are. The chapter will help you understand the roles the natural language processing platforms play in the development of VUIs. Also, the chapter will introduce modern voice enabled applications such as the chat bots, the personal digital assistant devices (Amazon Echo and Google Home), and the automobile virtual assistant system and how the VUIs can be beneficial to these applications.
⦁ Chapter 2, Building an FAQs Chatbot, helps you understand and program in Dialogflow, a natural language processing platform from Google. You will utilize the concepts like entities, intent, context and actions to create a chatbot. Then learn to deploy and test your chatbot using Google Assistant using Android and iOS.
⦁ Chapter 3, Building a Fortune Cookie Application, starts by creating the voice user interfaces in Dialogflow for the fortune cookie application that tells the famous people's quotes. Then you will be creating the webhook in Node.js to handle the incoming Dialogflow fulfillment requests. In Node.js, you will learn to trigger follow up or custom intents, create a visual response if the device supports visual elements, build speech synthesis markup language and integrate audio files in response. Finally, you will learn to work with Dialogflow analytics.
⦁ Chapter 4, Hosting, Securing, and Testing Fortune Cookie in the Cloud, teaches about Microsoft Azure cloud platform. And you will learn to deploy Node.js to Microsoft App Service and deploy the data to CosmoDB. You will learn apply the security to the Node.js REST API and finally you will be using Dialogflow SDK to create functional test.
⦁ Chapter 5, Deploying the Fortune Cookie App to Google Home, teaches your how to set up Google Home and then deploy development version of your cooking application. Then you will learn about the Google Home application certification process and submit your cooking application to the Google marketplace.
⦁ Chapter 6, Building a Cooking Application Using Alexa, teaches about using Alexa to build cooking application for the Amazon Echo devices. You will learn to use Alex Skills Kit to create the voice user interfaces for the cooking application. This chapter will cover basic Alex concepts like intent, slots and utterances required for building the voice user interfaces. Finally, you will build back-end Node.js webhook to process Alexa requests.
⦁ Chapter 7, Using Advanced Alexa Features for the Cooking App, teaches you how to log application events and errors to the Microsoft Azure storage. Then you will further enhance the cooking application by using built-in intents and managing your own application state in Redis. Finally, you will learn to submit your application to Amazon marketplace.
⦁ Chapter 8, Migrating the Alexa Cooking Application to Google Home, covers how to migrate Alexa skill to Dialogflow agent. Learning to convert Alexa skill to Dialogflow agent will help you reach wide ranges of audiences from multiple devices. Finally, you will learn to write Node.js webhook that can handle both Alexa and Dialogflow requests.
⦁ Chapter 9, Building a Voice-Enabled Podcast for the Car, teaches your how to create MusicService, MediaPlayer and MusicProvider that are needed for Android Auto to allow users to browse through the media content and play the podcast. You will be creating Android mobile media player UI in order to test MusicService.
⦁ Chapter 10, Hosting and Enhancing the Android Auto Podcast, teaches you how to simulate podcast application your wrote in previous chapter using desktop header unit to simulate in Android Auto. Then you will learn to test the podcast application using a real car. Finally, you will learn some basic voice commands for the Android Auto.
