18 Chatbot and Conversational AI books every Conversational designer needs in their life

I asked some fellow chatbot and  Conversational Ai folk on LinkedIn what books they recommend so I could add some new material to my reading list and was totally amazed at how many of these titles had just passed me by.

It makes total sense to share them with the wider #chatbot and #conversationalai community here on LinkedIn. This list is in no particular order and I'm not giving my opinion on any of them.

I've also linked all the images to the books should you wish to learn more. Enjoy and if you have any recommendations, add them in the comments.

The Definitive Guide to Conversational AI With Dialogflow and Google Cloud by Lee Boonstra (book royalties are donated to charity)

Build enterprise chatbots for web, social media, voice assistants, IoT, and telephony contact centers with Google's Dialogflow conversational AI technology. This book will explain how to get started with conversational AI using Google and how enterprise users can use Dialogflow as part of Google Cloud. It will cover the core concepts such as Dialogflow essentials, deploying chatbots on web and social media channels, and building voice agents including advanced tips and tricks such as intents, entities, and working with context. 

BUY - The Definitive Guide to Conversational AI With Dialogflow and Google Cloud

The smart wife by Yolande Strengers and Jenny Kennedy

The life and times of the Smart Wife--feminized digital assistants who are friendly and sometimes flirty, occasionally glitchy but perpetually available.

Meet the Smart Wife--at your service, an eclectic collection of feminized AI, robotic, and smart devices. This digital assistant is friendly and sometimes flirty, docile and efficient, occasionally glitchy but perpetually available. She might go by Siri, or Alexa, or inhabit Google Home. She can keep us company, order groceries, vacuum the floor, turn out the lights. A Japanese digital voice assistant--a virtual anime hologram named Hikari Azuma--sends her "master" helpful messages during the day; an American sexbot named Roxxxy takes on other kinds of household chores. In The Smart Wife, Yolande Strengers and Jenny Kennedy examine the emergence of digital devices that carry out "wifework"--domestic responsibilities that have traditionally fallen to (human) wives. They show that the principal prototype for these virtual helpers--designed in male-dominated industries--is the 1950s housewife: white, middle class, heteronormative, and nurturing, with a spick-and-span home. It's time, they say, to give the Smart Wife a reboot.

BUY - The smart wife

Wired for speech by Nass and Brave

Interfaces that talk and listen are populating computers, cars, call centers, and even home appliances and toys, but voice interfaces invariably frustrate rather than help. In Wired for Speech, Clifford Nass and Scott Brave reveal how interactive voice technologies can readily and effectively tap into the automatic responses all speech -- whether from human or machine -- evokes. Wired for Speech demonstrates that people are "voice-activated": we respond to voice technologies as we respond to actual people and behave as we would in any social situation. By leveraging this powerful finding, voice interfaces can truly emerge as the next frontier for efficient, user-friendly technology.

BUY - Wired for speech

Inclusive Design for a Digital World by Regine M.Gilbert

What is inclusive design? It is simple. It means that your product has been created with the intention of being accessible to as many different users as possible. For a long time, the concept of accessibility has been limited in terms of only defining physical spaces. However, change is afoot: personal technology now plays a part in the everyday lives of most of us, and thus it is a responsibility for designers of apps, web pages, and more public-facing tech products to make them accessible to all. Our digital era brings progressive ideas and paradigm shifts – but they are only truly progressive if everybody can participate.

Buy - Inclusive Design for a Digital World

Good Talk: How to Design Conversations that Matter by Daniel Stillman

Real change is needed, now, more than ever. This change can’t happen through force, edict or persuasion. The future will be built through conversation - and Good Talk will show you how.

Good Talk is a step-by-step framework to effect change in your personal and professional conversations. With dozens of tools and interactive components, Good Talk is a handbook to navigate the conversations that matter.

BUY - Good Talk: How to Design Conversations that Matter

Voice Content and Usability by Preston So

Interfaces have long been visual affairs, with content confined to the text and images behind our screens. But that’s changing. Humans have started talking to interfaces and interfaces are talking back.

Now we need to ensure those interfaces can converse effectively, thoughtfully, and naturally. Preston So introduces us to the exciting new frontier of voice content design, and the questions that designers, content strategists, and engineers need to answer in order to build richly structured, inclusive communication with the powerful medium of voice.

BUY - Voice Content and Usability

Mastering Voice Interfaces by Ann Thyme-Gobbel

Build great voice apps of any complexity for any domain by learning both the hows and whys of voice development. In this book, you’ll see how we live in a golden age of voice technology and how advances in automatic speech recognition (ASR), natural language processing (NLP), and related technologies allow people to talk to machines and get reasonable responses. Today, anyone with computer access can build a working voice app. That democratization of the technology is great. But, while it’s fairly easy to build a voice app that runs, it's still remarkably difficult to build a great one, one that users trust, that understands their natural ways of speaking and fulfills their needs, and that makes them want to return for more.

BUY - Mastering Voice Interfaces

Elements of Voice First Style by Ahmed Bouzid and Weiye Ma

If you're a new or experienced designer of conversational voice-first experiences, this handy reference provides actionable answers to key aspects of eyes-busy, hands-busy, voice-only user interfaces. Designed as a companion to books about conversational voice design, this guide includes important details regarding eyes-free, hands-free, voice-only interfaces delivered by Amazon Echo, Google Nest, and a variety of in-car experiences.

Authors Ahmed Bouzid and Weiye Ma provide far-field voice best practices and recommendations in a manner similar to The Elements of Style, the popular American English writing style guide. Like that book, The Elements of Voice First Style provides direct, succinct explanations that focus on the essence of each topic. You'll find answers quickly without having to spend time searching through other sources.

BUY - Elements of Voice First Style

Conversational Design by Erika Hall

How do we make digital systems feel less robotic and more real? Whether you work with interface or visual design, front-end technology, or content design, learn why conversation is the best model for creating device-independent, human-centered systems. Research and information design expert Erika Hall explains what makes an interaction truly conversational and how to get more comfortable using language in design. From understanding the human interface, to effectively using the power of personality, to getting it all done, you’ll find out how the art of communication can elevate technology.

BUY - Conversational Design

Conversations with Things by Diana Deibel & Rebecca Evanhoe

Welcome to the future, where you can talk with the digital things around you: voice assistants, chatbots, and more. But these interactions can be unhelpful and frustrating―sometimes even offensive or biased. Conversations with Things teaches you how to design conversations that are useful, ethical, and human–centered—because everyone deserves to be understood, especially you.

BUY - Conversations with Things

Talk: The Science of Conversation by Elizabeth Stokoe

We spend much of our days talking. Yet we know little about the conversational engine that drives our everyday lives. We are pushed and pulled around by language far more than we realize, yet are seduced by stereotypes and myths about communication.

This book will change the way you think about talk. It will explain the big pay-offs to understanding conversation scientifically.

BUY - Talk: The Science of Conversation

Hands-On Chatbots and Conversational UI Development: Build chatbots and voice user interfaces with Chatfuel, Dialogflow, Microsoft Bot Framework, Twilio, and Alexa Skills by Srini Janarthanam

Conversation as an interface is the best way for machines to interact with us using the universally accepted human tool that is language. Chatbots and voice user interfaces are two flavors of conversational UIs. Chatbots are real-time, data-driven answer engines that talk in natural language and are context-aware. Voice user interfaces are driven by voice and can understand and respond to users using speech. This book covers both types of conversational UIs by leveraging APIs from multiple platforms. We'll take a project-based approach to understand how these UIs are built and the best use cases for deploying them.

BUY - Hands-On Chatbots and Conversational UI Development

Designing Bots: Creating Conversational Experiences by Amir Shevat

From Facebook Messenger to Kik, and from Slack bots to Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and email bots, the new conversational apps are revolutionizing the way we interact with software. This practical guide shows you how to design and build great conversational experiences and delightful bots that help people be more productive, whether it’s for a new consumer service or an enterprise efficiency product.

Ideal for designers, product managers, and entrepreneurs, this book explores what works and what doesn’t in real-world bot examples, and provides practical design patterns for your bot-building toolbox. You’ll learn how to use an effective onboarding process, outline different flows, define a bot personality, and choose the right balance of rich control and text.

BUY - Designing Bots: Creating Conversational Experiences

Conversational Marketing by David Cancel & Dave Gerhardt

Conversational Marketing is the definitive guide to generating better leads and closing more sales. Traditional sales and marketing methods have failed to keep pace with the way modern, internet-savvy consumers purchase goods and services. Modern messaging apps, which allow for real-time conversations and instant feedback, have transformed the way we interact in our personal and professional lives, yet most businesses still rely on 20th century technology to communicate with 21st century customers. Online forms, email inquiries, and follow-up sales calls don’t provide the immediacy that modern consumers expect. Conversational marketing and sales are part of a new methodology centered around real-time, one-on-one conversations with customers via chatbots and messaging.  By allowing your business to communicate with customers in real time—when it’s most convenient for them—conversational marketing improves the customer experience, generates more leads, and helps you convert more leads into customers.

BUY - Conversational Marketing

Conversational UX Design by Robert J. Moore and Raphael Arar

With recent advances in natural language understanding techniques and far-field microphone arrays, natural language interfaces, such as voice assistants and chatbots, are emerging as a popular new way to interact with computers.

They have made their way out of the industry research labs and into the pockets, desktops, cars and living rooms of the general public. But although such interfaces recognize bits of natural language, and even voice input, they generally lack conversational competence, or the ability to engage in natural conversation. Today’s platforms provide sophisticated tools for analyzing language and retrieving knowledge, but they fail to provide adequate support for modeling interaction. The user experience (UX) designer or software developer must figure out how a human conversation is organized, usually relying on commonsense rather than on formal knowledge. Fortunately, practitioners can rely on conversation science.

BUY - Conversational UX Design

Designing Voice User Interfaces by Cathy Pearl

Voice user interfaces (VUIs) are becoming all the rage today. But how do you build one that people can actually converse with? Whether you’re designing a mobile app, a toy, or a device such as a home assistant, this practical book guides you through basic VUI design principles, helps you choose the right speech recognition engine, and shows you how to measure your VUI’s performance and improve upon it.

Author Cathy Pearl also takes product managers, UX designers, and VUI designers into advanced design topics that will help make your VUI not just functional, but great.

BUY - Designing Voice User Interfaces

Ubiquitous Voice by Lisa Falkson

The last few years have seen an explosion of use and popularity of speech recognition and natural language systems. From Siri in your pocket to Alexa or Google Home on your countertop, the proliferation of devices has made these systems more commonplace.

With the market expanding, there becomes a need for a new, larger population of speech experts to design the future of these devices and applications. This volume hopes to share a real-life view of the world of design, development, product management of speech products and applications. It also includes a market overview, history and personal stories from key contributors in the space.

The goal of these essays is to provide perspectives from various experts in the field. From designers to product managers to analysts to CEOs, they each share a unique perspective on an aspect of the speech industry.

BUY - Ubiquitous Voice

How to be a GREAT Conversation Designer By Jim Rowe-Bot

10 years ago you would not have found anyone with the skill of ‘Conversational Designer’ or ‘Conversational AI Analyst’ or “Chatbot architect’, or any of the 30 other Conversational AI (CAI) related job titles we have now. A quick search on LinkedIn for Conversational AI brings up more than 9000 results. With the growth of technology comes many opportunities for those who choose, or fall into the world of CAI. If you are working in this niche you may feel overwhelmed, isolated, ignored or worse. That is why I created this ebook.

You will find insights, advice and clear steps you can take to become a GREAT Conversational Designer. This ebook is not about how to build conversations that convert or how to write the best dialogue. This is more about you, your mindset, your career and your continued personal development.

BUY - How to be a GREAT Conversation Designer

If you have any books you would like to recommend just pop over to my LinkedIn profile and send me a message.

All the best!

Jim