AI Book Club: Effective Conversational AI

September's book is "Effective Conversational AI"!

This is a casual-style event. Not a structured presentation on topics. Sometimes, the discussion even drifts away from the chapters, but feel free to grab the mic to help steer it back.

Feel free to join the discussion even if you have not read the book chapters! :)

Want to discuss the contents during the reading week? Join the Slack Flyte MLOps Slack group and search for the "ai-reading-club" channel. https://slack.flyte.org/

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About the book:
Title: Effective Conversational AI
Authors: Eniko Rozsa, Andrew Freed, Cari Jacobs
Published: April 2025

https://learning.oreilly.com/library/view/effective-conversational-ai/9781633436404/

or on Manning: https://www.manning.com/books/effective-conversational-ai

Chapters:
Part 1 Framework for improving conversational AI
1 What makes conversational AI work?
2 Building a conversational AI
3 Planning for improvement
Part 2 Pattern: AI doesn’t understand
4 Understanding what your users really want
5 Improving weak understanding for traditional AI
6 Enhancing responses with retrieval-augmented generation
7 Augmenting intent data with generative AI
Part 3 Pattern: AI is too complex
8 Streamlining complex flows
9 Harnessing context for an adaptive virtual assistant experience
10 Reducing complexity with generative AI
Part 4 Pattern: Reduce friction
11 Reducing opt-outs
12 Conversational summarization for smooth handoff

Book Description
Create and improve conversational AI with the latest patterns, best practices, and tools, including generative AI models.

Conversational AI (CAI) tools are built to solve problems, but all-too-often they just end up causing pain for users–and developers! Effective Conversational AI reveals best practices and industry-tested techniques for creating chatbots and conversational AI tools that are reliable at an enterprise scale. With the tested ideas and examples in this book, you’ll learn to build chatbots that your customers and colleagues will actually want to use!

In Effective Conversational AI you’ll learn how to:

• Create high-quality chatbots and other conversational AI experiences
• Plan for continuous improvement
• Incorporate generative AI solutions to improve quality, accuracy, and usability
• Evaluate user experience and business results

Effective Conversational AI introduces continuous improvement practices that are vital for the constant betterment and evolution of chatbots and CAI tools. It introduces the three most-common forms of chatbot—Q&A, process-oriented, and routing agents—and presents a reliable framework for continuously improving each one. Using modern generative AI and tried-and-tested classic approaches, you’ll learn to deliver high performance chatbots that can guide a customer through complex end-to-end tasks—no human required!

https://learning.oreilly.com/library/view/effective-conversational-ai/9781633436404/

or on Manning: https://www.manning.com/books/effective-conversational-ai