Tour Guide for Your City

Having got a taste of chatbots and their brief history, in this chapter we'll get our hands dirty by building your first chatbot. We will build a chatbot that will act as a city tour guide for the user. We will use popular tourist conversations, such as learning about the city, figuring out things to do, and searching for places to eat as example tasks. We will explore how to use the various tools in the toolkit to build a chatbot capable of performing these conversational tasks. 

Let us explore a popular tool, Chatfuel, and learn how to build a chatbot from scratch. Chatfuel is a tool that enables you to build a chatbot without having to code at all. It is a web-based tool with a GUI editor that allows the user to build a chatbot in a modular fashion. In addition to building chatbots, it also enables developers to monitor and manage the bot's performance using management and analytics tools.  

In this chapter, we will explore the building blocks of a chatbot. We will then build a tour guide chatbot from scratch and deploy it on Facebook Messenger. We will explore various features provided by Chatfuel to extend the capabilities of the chatbot such as backend integrations and broadcasting messages. Finally, we will take a brief look at the analytics suite.

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

• Understand the basics of Chatfuel
• Understand the concept of conversational flow and navigation
• Understand the building blocks: blocks, cards, plugins, and attributes
• Manage contexts using key-value pairs and handle user utterances
• Build chatbots and integrate webhooks for backend processing
• Integrate the chatbot on Facebook Messenger