The success of artificial intelligence is being celebrated worldwide. And interestingly, the topic of our discussion – chatbots form a part of this tide of success. A number of people, including you and I prefer the goodness of messaging apps, such as Skype, Facebook Messenger, Slack, and Whatsapp. And now, with the increase in the number of messengers, there is also an increase in the number of virtual chatterbots, which conduct human-like conversations. Here we will discuss the powerful Chatbot development platforms. and which platforms to build a Chatbot can be used.
Some of these are mainly focused on resolving various consumer concerns. For example, one of the WeChat bots developed by China is capable of booking cabs, flight check-ins, fixing medical appointments and others. With online chatbots, the usual customer support is now faster, better and less time-consuming. We are not far from the days when the customer interactions would be easily handled without the need for a human intervention.
Since we discussed only chatbots offering their services for customer support, don’t think that it is limited to just that. But it is more – which means chatbots can be used for numerous other business activities, including user data collection, reducing total costs and others. It might not be easy for humans to trust a machine in the role of an interactive agent. So it will still take time to be implemented across a number of processes, though the programming and technology behind it have already been hardwired into the system.
What is a Chatbot? What is the use of it?
Let us take a look at what exactly is a chatbot, why it is used, what can they do, and why are they important?
One of the prominent definitions found online regarding a Chatbot is that it is a computer program that is designed to help simulate conversations with human users, specifically over the internet.
To be more precise, chatbots can be considered as an assistant that initiates conversations with humans via text messages, apps or in the form of a virtual guide that is integrated within the websites or as instant messages, thereby helping businesses reach out to their consumers, and find out what they need and help them.
So as we have discussed, chatbots take care of repetitive business tasks, thus making it easier to utilize human force for more productive and innovative tasks. And the speed at which chatbots can take care of each task is mind-blowing. This helps to save the time of consumers, which is why it would be a great idea to introduce chatbots at the earliest. Below listed are a few highlights of using chatbots:
- With chatbots, it takes lesser time to gain access to critical information, which means there is an increase in productivity.
- Sometimes, chatbots would take people through some funny and interesting moments, while they are looking for ways to get rid of their boredom.
- With chatbots, you can easily bring about an increase in conversions over social media. Some of the interesting advantages as we discussed is that with chatbots, people can find a companion to chat with once they start conversing with bots.
- Chatbots seem to be interesting, thereby triggering people’s interest to find out more about how and what are they.
If you are not aware, you have been interacting on Facebook Messenger via a chatbot. This messenger as we discussed earlier, has grown popular among the Messenger using crowd. We will be discussing the platforms for developing chatbots. A chatbots publishing platform differs from a chatbot development platform.
Some of the examples of a chatbots publishing platform include Kik, Telegram, Slack, We Chat and Facebook Messenger. So in a chatbot publishing platform, users can access and use chatbots. You can use this platform to publish your ideas or thoughts, which will be visible to your friends and others, whereas a chatbot development platform is a tool or an application that can be used for creating chatbots. Some of the chatbots development platforms include Botsify, Bottr, Botkit, etc.
When working on a chatbot development platform, you have the liberty to add functionalities and features to your bot, including machine learning capabilities, flow creation, API integration and so on. In fact, these chatbots platforms are simple and easy to understand and can be worked on using one of the most simple drag and drop approach. Even if you have little or no technical knowledge at all, you can use this approach for developing a bot.
Let us get into our topic now.
Top Chatbot Development Platforms
Regardless of whether you have little or no technical knowledge at all, you can create a chatbot that can be implemented on Facebook Messenger using Chatfuel. Some of the features that it offers include content cards, which can be automatically shared with your followers, while also allowing users to request info, interact using buttons and also collect information within the messenger chats. People prefer to select through the options provided to them rather than chatting with chatbots (studies say so).
This is a point where artificial intelligence technology comes into the bigger picture, allowing scripting interactive conversations. You can easily implement AI to identify answers to users’ queries and finally frame the appropriate response.
Anyone can utilize this service to create a bot on this chatbots platform. But once your chatbot has reached the 100K conversation limit a month, you will have to become a premium customer to enjoy the services further. Some of the companies implementing Chatfuel for their Chatbots on Facebook Messenger include MTV, Volkswagen, Adidas, British Airways and others.
Another popular Facebook Messenger, Botsify, is a chatbots platform that can be used with the drag and drop template, thereby helping to create bots. It helps people to create chatbots, such as easy integrations through plugins, machine learning, analytics integration, and smart AI. For people who have no or little technical knowledge, the concepts of machine learning and AI might be challenging, which is where Botsify comes into the picture, as its simple drag and drop template makes the process easier for people.
There might be certain situations where you would require to capture the chat within the bot. Here, Botsify has an intelligent process in place – wherein a human takeover capability would ensure a smooth transition from a bot to a human. This service can be availed free of cost for one of the bots and is chargeable for services after that.
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Flow XO
This is highly popular as it offers around 100 integrations. This bot comes with a visual editor that is simple and easy to use and understand. When you are using Flow XO, you can build any number of bots for any number of platforms simultaneously. But you do not get to enjoy this facility with any other platforms, where you are required to create a bot again every time. Since the templates are already ready to use, you do not have to spend time thinking or innovating something from your imagination, which might take ages. Also, you can enjoy all the features that we discussed with Botsify and Chatfuel. But after a certain subscription limit has been attained, you need to make a further subscription to continue enjoying the service.
With Bottr, You can now create your personal bot from your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. It would take less than five minutes to set up your bot, which can create some basic questions automatically from Facebook data, which include:
- Your place of birth
- Educational qualifications
- About yourself
- Date of birth
- Current address
With Bottr, you can now embed your bot into your website. Also, it allows you to add data from WordPress, Wikipedia, and medium according to your preference.
This is a bot development platform, which will help you to train, create and execute your chatbot. You have the ability to create and manage all your conversation logic using this bot builder, using which you can understand all predefined queries and set up responses instantly. With Recast.ai, you get messaging metrics and bot analytics tools that help in enhancing and fastening the understanding. This means now you have one of the best collaborative platforms, which you can use to build, deploy, train and monitor intelligent bots.
In conclusion, it is the ultimate collaborative platform to build, train, deploy and monitor intelligent bots.
One of the integral parts of building a chatbot could be using a toolkit and for this, you would need to insert BotKit. So with this developers can now make bots for Slack and Facebook Messenger, and others. With BotKit, you can now create intelligent applications that also support conversations, mapping out exactly the way humans converse in real time. This is what differentiates it from the above-discussed chatbot toolkits.
Some of the important tools of Botkit include Botkit studio, core library, boilerplate app starter kits, and plugins, which will help to extend bot capabilities. This is an open-source software with immense community support available on GitHub.
Would you like to find out more about chatbots? Talk to us. We can provide you with further information.
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