How To Make A Chatbot From Scratch

How To Make A Great Chatbot From Scratch

Expert tips to create a highly functional chatbot.

These days, companies find it very hard to enhance their customer experience, thus, they want to know how to make a chatbot. And, they invest almost all to develop the best chatbot for their business benefits.

Here, we will extend you the necessary information and resources to create a chatbot. Moreover, you will also know how to improve your chatbot after reading this blog.

What is a chatbot?

Chatbots are Artificial Intelligence-powered systems used to interact with human beings by means of a text or voice interface with the purpose to answer their questions.

Such interactions can be simple, for example: asking a chatbot about the weather report, or there could be something complex, like asking a chatbot to troubleshoot a problem with the Internet service.

How to build a chatbot

The steps given below will help you out in the chatbot development:

1. Know the opportunities for an AI-powered chatbot

All of first, make yourself aware of the opportunities for an AI-powered chatbot.

Companies always think of utilizing new Bot technologies in their business, so they need a way of thinking about which types of work can be augmented or automated by AI solutions.

Artificial Intelligence solutions can be given attention as per the two criteria: Data and work complexity for a specific type of work activity.

The dual analysis of data and work complexity brings about four types of activity models: innovation, expert, efficiency, and effectiveness.

2. Knowing your customers’ goals

First, you must know exactly why you want to get a chatbot developed, and what the chatbot is expected to do.

Having a clear idea of this will be helpful for the designer to create conversations targeted at fulfilling the goals.

If the designer knows the purpose of chatbot development, it will be much easier for them to design the conversation with the chatbot.

3. Chatbot conversation designing

Interactions of chatbot are split into structured and unstructured interactions.

The structured conversation is more about the logical flow of information. It includes choices, menus, and forms into account.

On the other hand, the unstructured conversation flow has freestyle plain text. The conversation with workmates, family members, friends, and other known people are categorized in this segment.

Creating scripts for these messages need to follow suit. On the contrary, developing the scripts for messages, it must be kept in mind that the conversation topics must be close to the purpose fulfilled by the chatbot.

It’s important for the designer to interpret the answer of the users to create scripts for a conversational user interface.

Designers also pay attention to close-ended conversations much easier to handle and loose conversations which make possible for customers to have conversations naturally.

4. Picking the appropriate chatbot platform

Although there is easy availability of the most powerful platforms to build a chatbot. All platforms have their own advantages and disadvantages and specific purposes.

To facilitate your selection, we have provided you a list of the best platform to develop a chatbot:

1. Botsify: This platform utilizes a drag and drop template to develop bots. Some famous features like simple integrations through Smart AI, plugins, machine learning and analytics integration are available too.

2. Chatfuel: Chatfuel offers features like adding content cards and sharing updates with your followers automatically, collecting information in Messenger chats with forms, and allowing users to request for information and interact with your chatbot with buttons.

3. Beep Boop: Beep Boop is known for providing end-to-end developer experience that makes possible for users to pay attention to developing great chatbots.

This platform is considered as the best and simplest way of developing slack bots.

4. Flox XO: Flow XO turns out to be the only chatbot platform to offer more than 100 integrations. It is famous for its easy-to-use visual editor. The platform also offers numerous pre-built templates for a quick beginning.

5. Motion AI: This platform boasts of visually building, training, and deploying chatbots on Slack, FB Messenger, Smooch, or your website.

It will make possible for you to diagram your conversation flow like a flowchart to have a visual overview of the outcomes of the query of the bot.

6. Bottr: This platform extends you an option to embed your bot on your website. It will also be possible for you to add data from a Medium, Wikipedia site, or Wordpress for better data coverage.

7. QnA Maker: Microsoft has developed QnA bot in which you need to share the URL of your FAQ page and the bot will be developed in a short while (some minutes) as per the information on the FAQ page and structured data.

8. Chattypeople: It has predefined chatbots ripe for starting-off. The website has templates for customer support, e-commerce, and food business.

If you pick an e-commerce chatbot, then you just need to add Q&A, Products, and some general settings.

9. Botkit: This platform has many useful tools including boilerplate app starter kits, Botkit Studio, a core library, and plugins for the extension of your bot capabilities.

10. Recast.AI | Collaborative Bot Platform: This platform can allow you to train, develop, and run your bot. Developing and managing your conversation logic with Bot Builder and visual flow interface assists you in setting up responses as quick as a flash.

11. Octane.ai: The platform has pre-built features which make it simple for you to add messages, content, filling out forms, discussions, showcasing merchandise, and the like to your bot.

12. ChatterOn: Chatter can assist you in building the bot flow and setting up the AI by entering a few examples of the expected conversation between the bot and users.

13. Gupshup: This platform’s innovative smart-messages has structured data and intelligence that is not in plain-text messages. Accordingly, it makes possible advanced messaging workflows and automation.

14. Converso.ai: This platform is integrated with multiple platforms. It includes Request & Conversation Tracking, complete User, and it has its own NLP parsing engine.

Summary

Due to innumerable chatbot benefits, chatbots are regarded as the future. And, every business is seeking how to create a chatbot to enhance their customers’ experience.

Here, we also mentioned the best platforms to make a chatbot and enlisted 14 chatbot development platforms including Botsify, Chatfuel, Beep Boop, Flox XO etc. listed above.

Final Words:

If you want to take your business to the next level, then you need to get a chatbot developed. And, to do so, you must hire chatbot developers who can build smart chatbots in order to perform complex tasks in simple ways. Afterall, chatbots are meant to make our lives easier.

How To Make A Chatbot From Scratch was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.