Who is this book for ?

If you are a developer interested in learning how to build your own conversational bot from scratch, this book is for you. Upon completion of this book you will be able to build a text-based Facebook Messenger bot and a voice-based custom skill for Amazon’s Alexa Voice Service.

In the first chapter, you learn about the conversational interface, its history, and why it’s gaining in popularity again. In the next few chapters you will build a virtual shopping assistant bot using the Facebook Messenger Platform. You’ll start with the basics and then work your way up to build a truly conversational bot that users can interact with using natural language. In the final chapter you go step-by-step, building a custom skill for the Alexa Voice Service. 

Prerequisites

You don’t need any prior knowledge of the Facebook Messenger Platform or the Alexa Skills Kit before reading this book, but we assume that you have basic knowledge of JavaScript, especially Node.js. If you are new to JavaScript or have never used Node.js before, we suggest you look through some books or tutorials to familiarize yourself before reading this book.

It will also be helpful if you have a basic understanding of RESTful web services, because we will be using and writing a few of them in our coding examples.

Authors

Amit Kothari is a software developer based in Melbourne, Australia. 
He has 10+ years experience in designing and developing software systems. His recent experience is in building large scale applications using Java-based microservices and a JavaScript frontend. He is passionate about lean software development and continuous delivery.

Rania Zyane is a software craftswomen engineer based in Rabat, Morocco.
She is constantly experimenting with new technologies and techniques, is passionate about agility, and strives to better herself as a developer and the development community as a whole. She’s actually working on building bots with Node.js and mobile apps.

Joshua Hoover is a founder and developer at emojination, where he developed, from the ground up, a Slack chat based game for teams using a tech stack of Node.js, Redis, Postgres, DynamoDB, and a variety of other Amazon AWS services. He also developed and contributed botkit-storage-dynamodb as an open source npm module.

Acknowledgments

We would like to start by thanking Christina Rudloff, Troy Mott, and the rest of the Bleedinge Edge Press team for helping us make this book a reality. We would also like to thank all of the technical reviewers for their valuable feedback and time. 

Special thanks to Facebook, Amazon and the teams behind all of the libraries and tools we have used in our coding examples.

Finally, we would like to thank our family and friends for providing all of the help and support we needed while writing this book.