The era of chatbots has now arrived, a new technological phenomenon that has helped generate a new way of interacting with machines, consequently creating businesses. 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 on.

A chatbot processes the text presented by the user, before responding based on a complex set of algorithms that interpret and identify what the user has said. After deducting what the user requires, it determines a set of appropriate responses based on the information extracted from the context. Some chatbots offer an extraordinarily authentic conversational experience, in which it is very difficult to determine if the agent is a bot or a human being.

Chatbots are also one of the most exciting innovations brought about by AI. In this chapter, after introducing the main concepts on which all of this technology is based, we will present the methods for building contextual chatbots and implement a simple chatbot end-to-end application on GCP.

Topics covered:

• Chatbot fundamentals
• Chatbot design techniques
• Natural language processing
• Google Cloud Dialogflow
• Chatbot building and implementation on GCP

At the end of the chapter, the reader will have completed a hands-on introduction to chatbots and learned how to train a contextual chatbot while implementing it in a real web application.