Build a ChatBot in 10 Minutes!Serverless Summit 2017, Bangalore

@dwmkerr

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Dave Kerr

Senior Expert, McKinsey & Company

…or… chatbot jugaad!

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Thank-you to the organisers and sponsors!

Who am I?

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I am a technology consultant.

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Which is closer to this…

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What am I going to talk about?

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Chatbots!

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Perfect for serverless technology. Today is about fun, not ROI!

…I’ve got to come clean about

something…

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…I know almost nothing about

chatbots!

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Lawrence Hunt, Selin Lanzafame, Dave Kerr

Introducing Lex

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“Amazon Lex is an AWS service for building conversational interfaces for any applications using

voice and text. With Amazon Lex, the same conversational engine that powers Amazon Alexa

is now available to any developer, enabling you to build sophisticated, natural language

chatbots into your new and existing applications. Amazon Lex provides the deep functionality

and flexibility of natural language understanding (NLU) and automatic speech recognition

(ASR) so you can build highly engaging user experiences with lifelike, conversational

interactions, and create new categories of products.”

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Say what?

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Let’s see it in action!

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Demo 1: Get a boring-bot running

https://github.com/dwmkerr/lex-starter-kit

refs/heads/demo1

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We setup the project with make setup

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We can deploy lex models with make deploy

Here’s how our conversation looks so far

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Getting Input

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Most conversations need input!

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Demo 2: Getting Input with Slots

https://github.com/dwmkerr/lex-starter-kit

refs/heads/demo2

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We configure the environment with make config

We can deploy lex models with make deploy

Our conversation flow is now more complete

Cool kids use the shell for

everythinggithub.com/dwmkerr/effective-shell

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Intermission: Using lex-chat

https://github.com/dwmkerr/lex-chat

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Using sessions to manage

conversation state

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Sometimes we have state which we

build up over a conversation…

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Demo 3: Sessions

https://github.com/dwmkerr/lex-starter-kit

refs/heads/demo3

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Use the session to persist conversation state between

intents

This gets complex! When do you

clear a session?

At least you save time on the

scripting

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Bootstrap your bots, and join in for

the next set of features!github.com/dwmkerr/lex-starter-kit

github.com/dwmkerr/lex-chat

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Thanks!

@dwmkerr

dwmkerr.com

github.com/dwmkerr

linkedin.com/in/dwmkerr

Appendices

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Tips and Tricks

• Question marks in intent utterances will break Lex!

• Train with realistic data

• Complicated or very variable slots are very hard to work with (e.g.

sentences), consider using cards

• Encrypt sensitive environment variables such as keys when using lambda

functions

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