I wrote a book: The Definitive Guide to Conversational AI With Dialogflow & Google Cloud

After I wrote my first book (Hands-on Sencha Touch 2 — O’Reilly), people always asked me if I would ever write another book. Especially, when I started to get expertise in conversational AI. I never said ‘never’, but I knew it would probably eat a lot of my time. Fast forward to February 2020, the whole world looked a lot different, and due to COVID-19, I had to cancel all my trips. Suddenly, I had a lot of extra time, plans for a book about chatbots became real! So I started to write…

There aren’t that many books about conversational AI for technical practitioners on the market, and I wanted to write this especially for enterprise users. Thus UX designers/linguists, web/conversational bot engineers, chatbot architects but also back-end developers, project managers and business decision makers that are working on complex conversational projects. Far beyond the ‘hello world examples’, as those are the real-world use cases that I see in my day to day life, while working for Google as a developer advocate and applied AI engineer focussing on Conversational AI.

Today, I am excited to announce with you that my book:

The Definitive Guide to Conversational AI With Dialogflow and Google Cloud?(Build Advanced Enterprise Chatbots, Voice, and Telephony Agents on Google Cloud)?has been released by?Apress?/?Springer?this week!

ISBN 978–1–4842–7014–1 & ISBN 978–1–4842–7013–4

It’s a book that covers all the conversational AI technology at Google Cloud & Google. Like,?Dialogflow Essentials,?Dialogflow CX,?Google Assistant?and?Contact Center AI. But it also covers Google Cloud technology such as BigQuery for advanced Chatbot analytics, how to build your own integration channels with?Cloud Run,?GKE,?Compute Engine?or?Cloud Functions. And it covers other Machine Learning APIs such?Natural Language Processing.

While reading this book, readers will learn the following:

• What’s Dialogflow, Dialogflow Essentials, Dialogflow CX, and how machine learning is used
• How to create Dialogflow projects for individuals and enterprise usage
• Learn Dialogflow Essentials Concepts like Intents, Entities, Custom Entities, System Entities, Composites and how to track context
• How to build bots quickly using prebuilt agents, small talk modules, and FAQ knowledge bases
• How Dialogflow can give an out of the box agent review
• How to deploy text conversational UIs for web & social media channels
• How to build voice agents for voice assistants (Google Assistant) & phone gateways/contact centers with Contact Center AI
• How to build multilingual chatbots
• Learn how to orchestrate many (sub) chatbots to build a bigger conversational platform
• How to use Chatbot analytics and how to test the quality of your Dialogflow agent (machine learning model)
• Learn how Dialogflow CX fits in, what’s different in Dialogflow CX and new Dialogflow CX concepts

These topics are more targeted to developers & engineers and contain more advanced use cases:

• Learn how to create fulfillment to connect to a web service in various ways
• How to run back-end code from a local/development machine
• How to secure your chatbots
• How to integrate your chatbots in a website (Angular) or native mobile (Flutter) app by creating your own custom integrations
• How to create an omnichannel bot platform architecture
• How to create rich responses in custom integrations
• How to stream your voice UIs in IoT voice applications
• Using BigQuery for advanced chatbot analytics

It contains tips and tricks and code examples to work on complex use-cases. It’s a book that I often use to quickly look up things like:?“Oh, how would I build a Google Assistant action with Dialogflow CX again?”,?“How can I test the underlying bot model to get the best performance?”,?“How does mTLS work to secure my bot fulfillments?”. With other words, it’s a book that I wrote for the conversational chatbot & voice community!

As a few of you might know, I wrote this book during my pregnancy, when the world went into lock down. To come full circle, I picked a non profit organization to donate all my book royalties to, which is the?“Meer dan Gewenst“, foundation in the Netherlands, an NGO that helps the LGBTQ+ community who have a wish to become parents. They do this by raising awareness (contacts with media, politicians and businesses), education and connections. As an LGBTQ+ parent myself, this charity is close to my heart, as I think having a wish to become a parent should be possible for everyone.

You can find my book as a paperback and ebook on?Amazon.

Feel free to connect with me on social media if you have comments or feedback about the book. Do you like my work? I would love to receive book reviews. As a developer advocate, I enjoy speaking about anything related to chat and voice bot technology. I am available for speaking engagements.