Hands-On AI: Building Your First Conversational AI Chatbot
1h 48mBeginner2025-07-21
Authors
Zhongyu Pan
Content Creator at LinkedIn
Course details
Get up and running with designing, developing, and fine-tuning conversational chatbots using Hugging Face Transformers and PyTorch. Instructor Zhongyu Pan covers the essentials of creating a baseline AI-powered chatbot and improving it with fine-tuning on real-world dialogue datasets. Along the way, explore key concepts such as tokenization, model training, and evaluation techniques. By the end of this course, you’ll be equipped with highly marketable, in-demand skills to create a fully functional chatbot for real-world businesses.
Learning objectives
Build a baseline chatbot using Hugging Face Transformers and PyTorch.
Fine-tune a pretrained AI model with custom datasets to improve chatbot responses.
Deploy the chatbot as a web application using Gradio and Hugging Face Spaces.
Evaluate chatbot performance by comparing baseline and fine-tuned models.
Upgrade the chatbot with additional approaches.
Learning objectives
Build a baseline chatbot using Hugging Face Transformers and PyTorch.
Fine-tune a pretrained AI model with custom datasets to improve chatbot responses.
Deploy the chatbot as a web application using Gradio and Hugging Face Spaces.
Evaluate chatbot performance by comparing baseline and fine-tuned models.
Upgrade the chatbot with additional approaches.
Skills covered
Hugging FacePyTorchAI Agents and Agentic SystemsBuilding with AIPythonOpen SourceOne-Off
Concepts
Introduction
- Hands-on conversational AI welcome
- Course roadmap - What you ll learn
Introduction to Conversational AI
- What is conversational AI
- Types of chatbots
- Applications of chatbots
- How to build chatbots
Setting Up the Development Environment
- Introduction to PyTorch and Hugging Face Transformers
- Setting up Google Colab and GPU for training
- Installing and importing required libraries
Building a Baseline Chatbot
- Introduction to pretrained conversational model - DialoGPT
- Loading DialoGPT
- Tokenization and preprocessing user input
- Generating responses with Transformers model
Launch Your First Chatbot Locally
- Introduction to Gradio
- Add CSS to your chatbot
- Setting up Gradio for your chatbot
- Launching and testing chatbot locally
Understanding Chatbot Fine-tuning
- Introduction to chatbot fine-tuning - What it is and why it matters
- Fine-tuning essentials - Datasets, overfitting, and generalization
- Choosing the right strategy - Fine-tuning vs. using pretrained models
Fine-Tuning the Chatbot for Better Conversations
- Choosing the right dataset
- Text data tokenization and preprocessing
- Fine-tuning with Trainer API
- Evaluate chatbot response quality
Further Upgrading Chatbot Responses
- Upgrade 1 - RAG (retrieval-augmented generation)
- Upgrade 2 - Improving response coherence and context awareness (and resources)
- Upgrade 3 - Handle uncertain responses with fallback mechanism
Launch Your Chatbot Online - Deploying on Hugging Face Spaces
- Creating a new space
- Upload your chatbot code
- Launching your chatbot online
Conclusion
- Course summary
- Next steps for learners