In this chapter, we discovered the amazing world of chatbots. Chatbots are robots, that interact with users through a chat and are able to assist them by carrying out extremely limited tasks: providing information on a current account, buying a ticket, receiving news about the weather, and so forth.

To begin with, we took a look at the fundamentals of the topic, starting with the history of chatbots in the 1950s, with the efforts of Alan Turing and various subsequent implementations of chatbots that perfected the basic concepts. Eliza, Parry, Jabberwacky, Dr. Sbaitso, ALICE, SmarterChild, and IBM Watson are the most important examples. As time passed and technology evolved, more and more sophisticated AI methods were created.

After introducing the basic concepts, we focused on the design techniques of chatbots and then moved on to analyze the architecture of a chatbot. We explored the interesting fields of NLP and NLU.

In the last part of the chapter, we covered Google Cloud Dialogflow, a platform for creating voice and text conversation applications based on machine learning. It supports 14 languages and can be integrated with major chat platforms. Finally, we created a simple chatbot that helps users to retrieve weather information about the most beautiful city in the world, that is, Rome. This can be an opportunity to travel, at least with the mind.