Building a Dynamic Conversational Bot on AWS

Working with a start-up whilst running your own company can be time consuming (although enjoyable!) and often means its difficult to find time to squeeze in professional training. Luckily AWS provide a wide range of training materials from small bite sized courses through to those which span multiple days.

I encourage anyone interested in tech or specifically AWS to register and take a look at the courses on offer they are excellent. 

Choices choices

Today I find myself a day before we head off on a family holiday with a few rare hours to myself. With no distractions from the children (still summer holidays here in the UK) or the dog I decided to look at the available courses from AWS.

I was hoping to attend an AWS Lex course earlier this year following the AWS Summit event in London so perhaps this was the ideal opportunity.

Building a Dynamic Conversational Bot

As luck should have it there was available 2.5hr course named; Building a Dynamic Conversational Bot - perfect!

Overview

Learn how to build a dynamic chatbot with AWS Training and Certification's Kirsten Dupart. She'll show you how to enhance user experiences with engaging bot interactions, how to adapt your bot to change, and how to appropriately deploy, secure, and monitor your bot. You'll also learn how to gather insight about what your users want via chatbots, and how to use AWS services to achieve all of your chatbot goals.

The link can be found here - https://www.aws.training/Details/eLearning?id=26873

What I thought about the course

The course was a mixture of theory and practical lab work which is the typical AWS approach which works well. It starts off with Kirsten Dupart explaining at a high-level how the AWS Lex platform works and how the other related services are combined to build a fully functional chat platform.

I wasn’t expecting the course to cover DynamoDB and Lambda in the level of detail but it was good to refresh myself on all things indexes and attributes.

Kirsten was an excellent presenter and explained the subject with obvious deep knowledge on Machine Learning and AI.

On completion of the course, my mind was buzzing with all the applications for the chatbots. Most of us think instantly about Facebook Messenger or that Live Chat window that pops up on the occasional website but its much more than that.

Using AWS Lex its possible to integrate website front-end, Facebook, Slack AWS Connect for telephone customer services and even Alexa skills - awesome!

You can find more information about AWS Lex here.

Next steps

Once back and recovered from a few days at Disneyland Paris with the family then i’ll be looking at creating a prototype service using the technologies mentioned above. I believe there are lots of opportunities to create and build some amazing platforms.

Anyway, now the top priority is to juice up those iPads for the trip tomorrow :)