COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO CHATBOT DEVELOPMENT

Have you ever spoken with a chatbot? If not, you've almost certainly heard of it. If you answered yes, you probably believed it may be useful in your business. And this is where you are correct, as more and more businesses are opting for a new and interesting method of communicating with customers via chatbots.

In a nutshell, a chatbot is an AI software that can do pre-programmed functions without the assistance of people. Their most obvious role, as implied by their name, is to converse with humans. With each additional bot produced, the number of tasks available expands. It can be personal help, restaurant reservations, calendar planning, or providing required data in a variety of fields, such as the weather forecast. 

Chatbots in business typically serve as customer service representatives. The more human-like their comments are made, the more valuable they are to the business. Such smart assistants already exist at the largest corporations. You were undoubtedly already entertained by a talk with Siri, Apple's product. Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and many more companies were among the first to incorporate its technology into business operations.

Benefits of Chatbots

Businesses may benefit greatly from chatbots. Especially if you build its functionality on the demands of your business. The following are some broad advantages that will appeal to people from all walks of life:

Automate customer service

Chatbots can effortlessly answer all of your customers' frequently asked queries.

Save human resources

Chatbots, like humans, are not weary of answering simple questions. Human resources, on the other hand, will be used for more difficult tasks.

Improve company image

Because chatbots are available 24/7, potential consumers may acquire the information they need whenever they decide to make a purchase, resulting in a stronger brand image among them.

Save costs

Chatbot development is less expensive than app development. Not to mention that replacing the human aspect for simple consumer questions would save you money.

Stand out among competitors

Chatbots are likely to be adopted by most businesses in the near future, so being among the first will provide you a competitive advantage and the loyalty of tech-savvy consumers.

Speed up processes

Unlike humans, chatbots are not restricted in the number of conversations they can have. It increases their efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

Choose time- and cost-efficient

When compared to human-only help, chatbots can turn more visitors into paying customers faster and easier.

Types of Chatbots

Chatbots are divided into two categories. Let's have a look at both and see how they work. 

Rule-based chatbots

Chatbots react to queries made by users by following a set of established rules or routines. All of your basic apps have rule-based chatbots that reply to inquiries depending on the rules that they have been educated on. For example, if you ask for a weather prediction, the program will gather data from several sources and answer with the information. Complex discussions may be impossible for rule-based chatbots to hold. Unless the creator makes additional changes, it can only execute the tasks for which it was intended.

Machine Learning-based chatbots

Machine learning-based chatbots may have more complicated conversations since they attempt to process the question and comprehend its meaning. It takes what it has learned from the last conversation and will be able to tackle more complicated questions in the future.

How do Chatbots Work?

You may have wondered how chatbots respond to the queries we ask. Are they really so smart to know all the answers? Sorry to disappoint you, but everything is planned out in advance by people.

Some bots understand just a limited set of commands and provide specific responses, such as search results. Among them are music bots that provide a user with a variety of search results. However, if you ask not only a musician's name but a real question, they will most likely tell you that no results were discovered.

Others may even be able to communicate with you in a human-like manner. Although keywords are present in the context of these exchanges. The rest is basically a predetermined pattern obtained from a library using a keyword. A solid conversation between a person and a chatbot is determined by two factors: the quality of libraries and general software that lies behind each bot and, on the other hand, how well the user request is interpreted.

In the latter situation, NLP (Natural Language Processing) assists them in interacting with actual people. They appear smart and intelligent in this manner. The trick is that they rely largely on machine learning methods.

How to Develop a Chatbot?

The initial stage would be to decide on the purpose of the chatbot and what problem it should solve. It specifies which path to take for the real development. Because there are more than one.

Knowing your target audience is also vital since it helps you design use case situations in the first place. By the way, if your target audience is from a certain messenger, such as Telegram, then some options become evident.

Remember the several versions of chatbot technologies? If you're happy with the first generation and don't want to employ a professional development team, chatbot builder frameworks are the way to go.

It is sufficient to create simple dialogues and submit them to a cloud platform. The bot itself is readily developed using drag-and-drop templates. The same as with LEGO! The frameworks manage all of the code, so you don't have to worry about it.

As you rightly realize, this chatbot cannot handle more sophisticated queries. It will not have any AI or NLP capabilities activated.

If you want your chatbot to be smart, only code-based frameworks can provide it, combined with a team of skilled individuals who can manage such frameworks and truly understand machine learning and AI.

As a consequence, you will have a chatbot capable of solving complex tasks and leading an unstructured discussion. These requirements will be met via a database, built-in analytics, and AI integration.

To summarize, there are two approaches you may take when developing your own chatbot:

• Non-coding frameworks:

Chatfuel, Botsify, Flow XO, Beep Boop, Converse.io, Chattypeople, Motion AI, Bottr, etc.

• Code-based frameworks:

Microsoft bot framework, API.ai, Wit.ai, IBM’s Watson, etc.

Which of these two options you choose is entirely up to you. It is often unnecessary to design a chatbot that is as intelligent as a human for some reasons; instead, a cheaper rule-based version that answers certain queries suffices. Most significantly, it must meet the expectations of consumers who do not need to know much about these bots but want a simple user-friendly solution.

All technical aspects of the chatbot creation process may be entrusted to the professional development team, ensuring the highest possible chatbot quality.

When you create a chatbot, the question of its advertising may arise. If it truly answers a specific need, potential customers should be able to identify it in today's overcrowded digital environment. Consider adding your chatbot to catalogs, developing a referral system, making a chatbot multilingual, allowing your users to evaluate it, and so on.

Use Cases of Chatbots

There are a variety of interesting chatbots that may make your life easier. Chatbot development for businesses focuses on enhancing corporate operations and providing a better user experience to consumers.

It is also used to service clients through social media platforms such as Facebook and others. However, the majority of Facebook bots are simple to make and utilize, as many of them do not require coding and can be created by anybody.

Joy, a popular modern chatbot built by Danny Freed to track and enhance mental health, is one of the most popular. Joy is designed to be a Facebook Messenger friend.

It provides daily check-ins and offers advice on how to deal with various emotional events, such as anxiety, to help you live a more satisfying life. The idea for Joy was inspired by a close friend of Freed who committed suicide.

For the time being, Joy can only ask questions and provide weekly mood reports based on your interactions with it. Based on interactions over time, you will soon be able to develop long-term solutions and therapies geared at improving your mental health.

Let's look at some of the chatbots that are being employed in various industries.

Online Shopping

Finding the suitable things that you want to buy is one of the most difficult aspects of buying.

Even if you are looking for something particular, this can be a time-consuming task. This can make purchasing more difficult.

eBay has created ShopBot, which may help users with their shopping and deliver a better buying experience. ShopBot's major goal is to assist customers in finding the greatest discounts and discovering new goods. Customers may tell the bot what they want to buy by using text, speech, or graphics.

It employs deep learning techniques, as well as Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and computer vision, to assist customers in expressing their shopping requirements and generating results based on these requests.

Kip is another interesting bot that can manage any amount of complex team commands. It includes the option of group cart instead of a separate shopping cart for each user. This allows multiple members of the same team to place separate orders at the same time, and the admin pays the total sum at checkout. This is a new technique of facilitating buying, particularly in workplaces.

Healthcare Support

UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) developed a virtual radiologist to assist patients with clinical decisions.

The virtual radiologist bot is based on Artificial Intelligence (AI), and its major goal is to offer the doctor with the capacity to transmit important information to the patient in real-time, such as an overview of radiology therapy or informing them about the next stages in a treatment plan.

The virtual assistant was developed on a base of over 2,000 sample data points meant to mimic queries often asked during an interventional radiologist consultation.

Woebot is another chatbot that was built to track your everyday talks and other daily actions that provide insights into the patient's mood and assist them in evaluating the patient's mental health and providing necessary answers.

CRM

Chatbots in CRM may be quite useful since they can perform all of the monotonous duties, enabling people to focus on more essential activities.

It can assist a sales staff in automating the data input process, allowing them to focus more on client contacts. It has been shown that 20% of sales people efforts are spent filling up CRM information. To overcome this issue, Fireflies, a bot, retrieves or mines data from audio chats in order to locate useful information to feed into the CRM.

Salesforce has created a bot that retrieves client data in order to converse with the customer directly on Slack. Though the database may include a variety of data, it only retrieves the relevant info.

Effective Project Management

Proper project management is essential for every project's success. Some project management automation can help with successful and efficient release.

Bots like Meekan assist in automatically matching team members' calendars, organising team meetings, preventing schedule clashes, and so on. This saves time on coordination via emails or calendar invitations and facilitates cooperation by simply asking the bot to plan a meeting at everyone's convenience.

Another significant challenge is task management. When it comes to marketing content, chatbots like Howdy may save human efforts and streamline task management. PMBot may create status reports automatically, reducing the need for status updates or meetings with team members.

Conclusion

Smart solutions are critical for every business's success. Chatbots may provide a much-needed competitive edge by delivering 24/7 customer care, boosting existing marketing operations, reducing time spent engaging with users, and streamlining internal procedures. If you want to construct a chatbot, the best thing to do is approach a company that understands your business needs and can help you reach your business goals.

PioGroup Software helps businesses to create highly tailored solutions based on artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, and upcoming technologies like augmented reality and virtual reality. Learn more about our AI and machine learning solutions.