推荐序二

My acquaintance with the authors of this book can be summed up as:3 workshops and 1 Karaoke night.

I first met them in 2016 when I was invited to give a talk on“Imagination&Creativity”.VIPShop had just started assembling a chatbot team，in a bold attempt to lift their customer experience to a new level with the assistance of state-of-the-art NLP/AI technology.

The following year we met twice，and the workshop topics show how much progress the team had made:we talked about“Performance Optimization”，and“FAQs and Chatbots:Content Management Tips and Tricks”.Clearly their creative and imaginative work had paid off，and they were now dealing with the grim reality of operating an actual chatbot ecosystem in the real world.

The project was a great success，and the chatbots of VIPShop are doing a better job than ever，answering billions of customer questions，ensuring a great user experience and offloading a mountain of work from the overtaxed live agent call centers.And so，my latest meeting with the authors was a celebration，when they invited me to join them in a Karaoke bar in Beijing at the end of 2018 for a night of drinks and singing.

It was then that they told me about their after-hours project of writing“Chatbots in Action”.They haven’t just built a world-class product，they have turned their experience into a new textbook for the field，sharing their knowledge with the next generation of chatbot craftsmen.

I surely cannot take credit for the achievements of the team.In fact，now that I’m perusing the outline of the book，in the summer of 2019，I realize the authors have gained a profound understanding of the chatbot world in all its dimensions，and I could only wish I had a book such as this to guide me as I entered the field.

I sincerely congratulate the authors with the fruits of their labor，I commend them for their creativity，and I warmly recommend this book to anyone interested in the world of Chatbot development.

Sincerely，

Jan van Sas

Jan van Sas has over 30 years of industry experience as a NLP/AI expert working for and consulting to multinationals as well as start-ups

From 2012 to 2017 as Oracle Director of Natural Language Solutions，he managed Oracle’s Virtual Assistant/Chatbot development teams across the world

Jan lives in Karlsruhe，Germany and is AI Professor at Karel de Grote University College in Antwerp，Belgium