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Chatbots that work
Andrew Freed, Cari Jacobs, Eniko Rozsa
  • MEAP began November 2024
  • Publication in Spring 2025 (estimated)
  • ISBN 9781633436404
  • 275 pages (estimated)
  • printed in black & white

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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

An underperforming chatbot is a liability to your business, and many conversational AI systems fail to deliver the cost savings and customer experience they promise. Effective Conversational AI introduces continuous improvement practices that are vital for the constant betterment and evolution of CAI tools. IBM chatbot gurus Andrew Freed, Eniko Rozsa, and Cari Jacobs share the lessons they have learned from improving chatbots over 50 million chat interactions. 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!

about the book

Effective Conversational AI is a guide to creating exceptional chatbots and getting failing conversational AI projects back on track. 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. You’ll create a chatbot that follows an evolutionary path, and see how to reliably integrate generative AI in a way that makes real improvements. Learn best practices that counteract AI’s common weaknesses, improve generative AI with custom training data and Retrieval Augmented Generation, and identify and ease your customer’s common pain points.

about the reader

For developers, engineers, and product managers working with conversational AI.

about the authors

Andrew Freed, Eniko Rozsa, and Cari Jacobs are seasoned conversational AI developers with IBM.

Andrew Freed is a Distinguished Engineer and a Conversational AI delivery architect who has successfully delivered multi-million-dollar CAI contracts. He is the author of Conversational AI (Manning).

Eniko Rozsa is a Distinguished Engineer and leads a Conversational AI delivery practice and is chief architect of a “Conversational Insights” tool used to analyze and improve Conversational AI. She has invented and designed her first Conversational AI solution in 2008, before it was productized and delivered to Fortune 500 clients.

Cari Jacobs is an expert Conversational AI delivery specialist with a series of articles on Medium.com (https://medium.com/@heyitscari). She is a delivery practice lead and designs, implements, and improves conversational AI solutions for Fortune 500 clients.

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