You Too Can Build a Bot!

From Google to Disney, Slack and Facebook, enterprise and consumer, conversational bot interfaces are a hot new trend for 2016. It seems everybody wants to get in on the craze, but they are not sure how. You may think that programming a decent chat bot involves years of artificial intelligence research, designing data structures, and a whole team of engineers. The truth, however, is different. With some knowledge of Node.JS, and a few APIs available to developers, you will learn how to build, maintain, and extend a conversational chat bot - and have fun with it! These bots use the Microsoft Bot Framework, which allows you to deploy one codebase to plenty of platforms, including Slack, Facebook, Skype, SMS, and others. All you need is some knowledge of Node.JS to get started. This lecture will cover building a conversational bot from scratch. We will also cover the business cases for building bots, for both enterprise and consumer-facing apps. Finally, we will explore more about the psychology of interacting with bots. Because you too can build a bot!