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Building Chatbots in Python

Learn the fundamentals of how to build conversational bots using rule-based systems as well as machine learning.

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4 Hours15 Videos49 Exercises
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Course Description

Messaging and voice-controlled devices are the next big platforms, and conversational computing has a big role to play in creating engaging augmented and virtual reality experiences. This course will get you started on the path toward building such applications. There are a number of unique challenges to building these kinds of programs, like how do I turn human language into instructions for machines? In this course, you'll tackle this first with rule-based systems and then with machine learning. Some chat systems are designed to be useful, while others are just good fun. You will build one of each and put everything together to make a helpful, friendly chatbot. Once you complete the course, you’ll also learn how to connect your chatbot to Facebook Messenger!
  1. 1

    Chatbots 101

    Free

    In this chapter, you'll learn how to build your first chatbot. After gaining a bit of historical context, you'll set up a basic structure for receiving text and responding to users, and then learn how to add the basic elements of personality. You'll then build rule-based systems for parsing text.

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    Introduction to conversational software
    50 xp
    EchoBot I
    100 xp
    EchoBot II
    100 xp
    Creating a personality
    50 xp
    Chitchat
    100 xp
    Adding variety
    100 xp
    ELIZA I: asking questions
    100 xp
    Text processing with regular expressions
    50 xp
    ELIZA II: Extracting key phrases
    100 xp
    ELIZA III: Pronouns
    100 xp
    ELIZA IV: Putting it all together
    100 xp
  2. 2

    Understanding natural language

    Here, you'll use machine learning to turn natural language into structured data using spaCy, scikit-learn, and rasa NLU. You'll start with a refresher on the theoretical foundations and then move onto building models using the ATIS dataset, which contains thousands of sentences from real people interacting with a flight booking system.

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  3. 3

    Building a virtual assistant

    In this chapter, you'll build a personal assistant to help you plan a trip. It will be able to respond to questions like "are there any cheap hotels in the north of town?" by looking inside a hotel’s database for matching results.

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  4. 4

    Dialogue

    Everything you've built so far has statelessly mapped intents to actions and responses. It's amazing how far you can get with that! But to build more sophisticated bots you will always want to add some statefulness. That's what you'll do here, as you build a chatbot that helps users order coffee.

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Datasets

ATIS (Airline Travel Information System)Hotels database

Collaborators

Collaborator's avatar
Hugo Bowne-Anderson
Collaborator's avatar
Yashas Roy
Alan Nichol HeadshotAlan Nichol

Co-founder and CTO of Rasa

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