Chatbots have become a new digital channel with which customers can engage with a product or service team. They are a form of self-service automation that uses natural language processing to help an organization scale operations and save cost. Chatbots present themselves on social media or other platforms in the same way as you'd send an instant message or interact with a real person. The goal of a chatbot is to understand what you are asking and perform actions that don't require human intervention.

AWS offers an artificial intelligence service called Amazon Lex where you can create and publish your own conversational bots. These bots can send events to AWS Lambda so that you can add business logic and integrations into your own systems.

Some common use cases for chatbots include customer service, IT operations, helpdesks, travel, and finance.

Chapter explores how to create a chatbot with native AWS services and then explores how to wrap a different chatbot into a project using the Serverless Framework.

In this chapter, we'll cover the following topics:

• Building a chatbot with Amazon Lex
• Building a Slackbot using Serverless Framework