Book Review: Building Chatbots with Python Using Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning

Who is the author?

Sumit Raj, through an interview on this blog, shared his knowledge of chatbot and web development with Python.

He is a Python expert from India with interest in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning.

Sumit has mentored students and professionals and he is a regular speaker at premier educational institutes of India, technical meeting ups like PyLadies etc.

He is an author of the book, “Building Chatbots with Python Using Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning”.

For more information about him, check his website.

Who is this book for?

This book is basically for Natural Language enthusiasts that want to build a chatbot.

Web developers that want to add chat bot development to their resume will find this book useful.

Programmers with knowledge of Python that want to learn how to set up a chatbot application.

Even an entrepreneur that has no technical skills will find this book useful especially in chapter 3 of the book where you will learn how to build a chatbot without coding and integrate it with Facebook Messenger.

Whether you want to build chatbots for fun or make some money from it, this book is one of the best resources available.

Book Contents

This 205-page book has five chapters which are:

• The beloved Chatbots
• Natural Language Processing for chatbots
• Building Chatbots the Easy Way
• Building Chatbots the Hard Way
• Deploying Your Chatbot

Chapter 1: The beloved Chatbots

This chapter starts with the popularity of Chatbots.

Basically,

Sumit begins by showing you how chatbots are in high demand due to their reliability and cost implication on industries such as e-commerce, insurance, logistics, recruitment etc.

He further states the kinds of problem that can be solved with chatbots such as automating answering FAQ with a bot.

At the end of this chapter was some technical explanation of what you need to know about building a chatbot.

Sumit also lists out the best chatbots/ bot frameworks available.

Chapter 2: Natural Language Processing for Chatbots

This chapter begins with giving you an idea of what Natural Language Processing (NLP) is and teaches you the aspects of NLP you need to know to build a chatbot.

You will learn about spaCy module in Python, its features and how to install it.

Furthermore,

You will learn about POS tagging, the difference between stemming and lemmatization, entity recognition, noun-chunking and finding similarity between sets of words.

If you are not familiar with these terms, don’t worry, you will learn these concepts not only by reading but also by coding.

Remember,

Use your brain as a processor and not as a hard disk.

Chapter 3: Building Chatbots the Easy Way

This chapter is friendly for newbies that want to quickly build a chatbot without doing it from scratch.

You will learn about a tool that you can use to build a chatbot without coding.

This chapter is very practical as you will build a food ordering chatbot and integrate it with Facebook Messenger.

Chapter 4: Building Chatbots the Hard Way

This is the main chapter of the book, “Building Chatbots with Python.”

At the end of this chapter,

You will find out that building a chatbot is not really hard.

This chapter shows you how to build a chatbot from scratch without using any cloud services such as Dialogflow, Watson, wit.ai etc.

Sumit used Rasa NLU library in his book to teach how to build a chatbot.

Chapter 5: Deploying Your Chatbot

If you build something, people have to see and use it right?

This chapter shows you how to deploy your chatbot application on Heroku.

But,

Your application has to look great right?

Sumit in his book shows how to create the UI of your chatbot.

You will also learn how to integrate your chatbot with Facebook using Facebook’s developer platform.

How to Get This Book

You can get this book here.

The post Book Review: Building Chatbots with Python Using Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning appeared first on Cool Python Codes.

from Cool Python Codes
via read more