“Chatbots” this interesting word has a very interesting use. People are not aware of what chatbots actually are and how do they work. But the most interesting fact is that most of the mobile users spend 90% of their time in using chatbots and they don’t even know about it. Users spend time on emailing and chatting platforms. These platforms are the places where the consumers can hangout, connect with each other and even talk. These places or platforms are the best examples of chatbots.
What Is A Chatbot?
A chatbot is a computer program or a service that is designed to simulate conversions between the users over the internet. It is powered by certain rules and regulations and some even believe that it is based on the concept of artificial intelligence that let users interact with each other through a chat interface.
This service could be anything, varying from a functional chatbot to a fun platform. Several companies have come up with chatbots that have gained immense popularity in the marketplace like Slack, Facebook Messenger, Text messages, etc.
Some chatbots based on Artificial Intelligence can automatically chat with the users and answer all their queries. As already mentioned, there is a great diversity in chatbot, and they function in many different ways. Depending upon its type, a chatbot can provide customer service to all your customers present online or even talk to them. Some are programmed to tell you current weather conditions and complete procedure of how to contest parking tickets. Chatbots have proved helpful for even businesses where they can respond to your customer, their queries and even help your employees to perform their job well.
What do You need To Know Before You Create A Bot?
There are certain fundamental designs questions that a developer must clear with the client before creating a bot. These include:
Domain Knowledge
Before you create a bot, it is important that you must be clear what does a user expect this bot to understand. Software or a program can never be so intelligent that it can answer all the questions of the users. Artificial Intelligence can impersonate humans or even let a bot answer some kinds of factual questions, but these cannot respond to a subset of topics or controversial chats. These bots can construct natural language response in a realistic way, but they cannot deliver your groceries or schedule your meetings. These bots cam help you create your chat accounts by guiding you well, but they cannot engage you in an open-ended dialogue.
Bot Personality
Many developers personify their bots as something less than full human as a result of which they later make excuses of rote responses as these bots lack understanding. Many even characterize them as female or teenagers, which is very disappointing. It is always better to personify your bot as itself – a program – and not as a human being.
How To Make A Chatbot?
Different software are available that allow you to create your own chatbots. These include:
Facebook Messenger Platform
Facebook has its own platform for creating a bot through their official page. This is the most advanced chatbot creator where you have to set up a few functions yourself. Before creating your bot, you need to setup a few tools like the Messenger plug-in, Messenger codes and links, structured templates, customer matching and a Welcome screen. Facebook offers a complete guide that can help you create a chatbot of your own.
Chatfuel
This is a chatbot creator for Telegram and Facebook. It is the best software to be used if you have your business page on Facebook and you want to create a bot for it. You don’t need to code anything as Chatfuel will guide you through each step of creating a bot. with the help of simple hyperlinks, you can easily add content and edit a response.
Smooch
Sometimes it’s difficult to check notifications or messages on different messengers. To solve this problem, Smooch helps you create a bridge between your business apps and messenger apps as it makes it easy for you to get all notifications from different apps on a single business app. This is very useful for businesses as they can now answer every chat question coming from the customer without changing away business app every time when they receive any message.
Botsify
It is a chatbot creator that is designed for Facebook users as well. Integrate your Facebook account with botsify, setup webhook, write commands and it will start providing customer service for your business. With Botsify, you can list your services and display them as navigation.
Botkit
It is a toolkit that can be used to create chatbots for Slack, Facebook Messenger, Twilio IP Messaging, etc. it is different from other chatbot creators as it provides a semantic interface to send & receive messages. It makes developers free from the hassles of dealing with API endpoints.
Apart from these tools, there is one more option to create a chatbot for your business. You can hire a development agency that can develop a nice and functional chatbot from scratch. They must have a software development team so that they can use various technologies like Ruby, PHP, and other programming languages to implement server side app into already existing chat service.
Getting a chatbot developed by an experienced team of software developers may have several advantages, for example, latest technologies, unique functionalities and they can also help you analyze your business needs so that they can come up with the unique and apt solutions.
But before you start creating your own bot, it is necessary that you must figure out what problem you will be solving with your bot. Also, decide the platform on which your bot will live and choose the service you will choose to create your bot.