How to create a chatbot? If this is your question, then you are at the right place. Businesses that look to stay a step ahead in the market by implementing the latest trends have found chatbots to be quite engaging. Chatbot app development will gather steam in the coming years as the chatbot market is estimated to reach a value of $102 billion by 2026. In this blog, we will have a detailed look at chatbot app development. Whether you want to hire chatbot developers or you want to develop your chatbot in-house, this guide will help you realize your goals. We will include what chatbots are and how they work, how to create a chatbot, and the chatbot development cost. Let’s begin.
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A chatbot (commonly also known as a bot) is a computer program whose purpose is to emulate a natural human conversation. The idea behind chatbot development is to offload some work done by humans to bots. The users communicate with a chatbot like they would with a human.
Chatbots can significantly increase the efficiency of your business. There are numerous ways in which using chatbots can be beneficial for businesses. The following are just a few of the most common business benefits of chatbots.
Before we learn how to make a chatbot, we will first have a look at how it works.
Like other computer programs, chatbots also have a database, CUI(conversational user interface), and an application layer. The developers normally train the chatbots using any one of the following methods.
As the name suggests, the natural language understanding algorithm is designed to help the chatbot understand what the users want to convey.
(Image Courtesy : researchgate)
Entities
The entities tell the Chatbot about an idea. For instance, a payment system in an eCommerce chatbot.
Context
Chatbots do not have the context of the user’s conversation. This means that if the Chatbot gets an answer to a recently asked question, then it would not recall the inquiry. Hence the algorithm stores phases of the chat separately. The phrase could be anything like “ordering burgers.” The phrases could also include parameters like “Mcdonald’s: restaurant.” Using context, the algorithm can easily comprehend the previous question.
Expectations
Expectations are actions that a chatbot should do when the customer demands some information. The action could be the same for different inquiries. For instance, ” I want to purchase a red bag,” ” Show me some red bags, I want to buy one” both these inquiries have the same action, showing red bags.
Here is an overview of the NLP-based bot architecture.
The (NLP) Natural Language Processing algorithm converts the user’s query into a structured data format. NLP comprises the following steps.
Tokenization
In the tokenization step, the algorithm assigns a token to a string of words.
Sentiment Analysis
The NLP in this step will transfer the query to a human if it feels the need to do so.
Normalization
The normalization step is concerned with ironing out the spelling mistakes and other common errors that might alter the meaning of the user’s request.
Named entity recognition
In this step, the algorithm tries to identify words similar to the name voiced by the user.
Dependency parsing
The algorithm of the Chatbot searches for common phrases, subjects, objects, and verbs in the text provided by the users. The exercise is concerned with finding out what exactly the users want to convey.
Chatbots come in all shapes and sizes. There are, however, certain major categories in which we can classify chatbots. Let’s have a look at the common types of chatbots available in the market today.
A linguistic-based chatbot might prove to be the best option for you if you can predict the kind of questions that your customers can ask. Using the classic if/then logic, the linguistic chatbots create flows of conversation with the users.
The programmers can create conditions to assess the order of the words, the synonyms of the words, and the words themselves. When the query matches the conditions, the users receive the appropriate response.
A linguistic model can prove to be painstakingly slow to develop. This is because the coders need to ensure that every possible question and answer is included. Linguistic chatbots are rigid and demand specific inputs from coders.
AI in mobile app development is a concept that has now entered the chatbot arena also. A contextual chatbot is a bot that utilizes the power of AI(artificial intelligence) and ML(machine learning) to grow over time. The contextual bots, unlike the linguistic bots, improve themselves over time based on the user’s queries.
The food ordering chatbots would be a nice example to show the power of contextual chatbots. A contextual bot will remember the food preferences of a customer along with other information like delivery address and payment information. The contextual Chatbot would simply ask whether the user wants to repeat the previous order or not. When the user types yes, the order will be placed. This way, the contextual Chatbot will make the order placement procedure fast and easy for the user.
This food ordering example clearly illustrates the power of AI-enabled contextual chatbots. The combination of AI & Chatbots work best for Customer engagements. A contextual bot significantly improves the user experience by leveraging the conversation text.
Apart from the above-mentioned major categories, we can also classify chatbots in the following ways
The chatbot development cost depends upon what you want from the Chatbot, and the integration, type, and functionalities of the Chatbot. Understand that chatbot technology is evolving and getting more sophisticated with time. With more sophistication, the cost of building a chatbot also increases.
The pricing of the Chatbot will also depend on whether you hire
If you choose to outsource your chatbot development work, then the location of the chatbot developers will also play a pivotal role in deciding the cost of your Chatbot.
Considering all the above factors, the price range for developing a chatbot could be anywhere between $-12,000 and $160,000.
Like any other process, successful chatbot development also involves following certain steps. Although you might outsource your chatbot app development to professional chatbot developers, some basic knowledge about chatbot app development will help. Here are the basic steps that will help you to build a chatbot.
The first and foremost goal of chatbot development is to provide a better user experience. To provide a better user experience, you should conduct a thorough market analysis first. Define the pain points of the customers that your Chatbot will address and build a buyer persona. You will be able to discover the expectations of your users and will get a better idea regarding the kind of Chatbot that you need to build.
Chatbot creation will prove to be much easier when you know the pain points of your customers. For instance, if you are building a food ordering chatbot, then the major pain point for your customers will be the delivery time. So ensure that your Chatbot clearly says the estimated delivery time right at the time of taking the order from the users.
It is possible to integrate a chatbot with various other apps. The most popular chatbot integrations are with apps like Facebook, Skype, and Telegram. Understand the requirements of your target audience and then choose the chatbot integrations accordingly.
Hire the best chatbot developers to ensure top-notch chatbot app development. Chatbot app developers are in high demand today, and finding a professional chatbot development companies can prove to be a tedious task.
As we can see rapid evolution of artificial intelligence and machine learning transforming the business technology landscape, leveraging generative AI services has become essential. Utilize AI to gain a competitive edge in your industry.
One of the major questions that come to mind when you think about how to make a chatbot is the question of tech stack selection. Choosing the correct tech stack is one of the most critical steps toward chatbot app development. There are a lot of chatbot development tools available today. The chatbot tools contribute toward chatbot development costs. Hence you should have a basic idea about the tools used in developing your Chatbot. Hire top chatbot developers to select the best tech stack according to your requirements.
To ensure a bug-free experience, you should test the Chatbot thoroughly before you launch it into the market. Testing the Chatbot will let you know whether the Chatbot meets the expectations and requirements of the users or not. Even after you launch the Chatbot, continuous testing is important to ensure that the Chatbot is updated according to the changing market requirements.
A wide range of platforms is available in the market today that will help you build a chatbot. We have discussed some of the most popular chatbot development platforms below.
Chatfuel is a platform that helps developers build facebook specific chatbots. The platform allows the developers to build custom designs for their chatbots. Chatfuel also helps the developers set up conversational rules in the dashboard. Chatfuel has a pretty cool feature where it adds a person to its database whenever the person interacts with the Chatbot. Chatfuel provides detailed analytics to improve the performance of the bot.
Pandorabots is one of the oldest chatbot hosting services in the industry. Pandorabots also happens to be one of the largest chatbot hosting services, with over 300,000 bots already built on the platform. Pandorabots is based on AIML(artificial intelligence markup language), which is an open standard scripting language. Even Fortune 500 companies use Pandorabots to build conversational chatbots. Pandorabots can help the developers build and deploy chatbots on Twitter, Slack, Line, and Telegram.
Meya AI is another popular bot-building platform that allows developers to build cognitive bots. The cognitive framework of Meya AI has everything that the developers need to build
a cognitive chatbot. Meya AI lets the developers host, build and train their cognitive Chatbot in a single place. The bot studio of Meya AI has a live debugger, code editor, visualizer, and test chat feature. It is easy to integrate Meya AI with other apps so that the developers can easily scale the chatbots.
Prismetric’s custom chatbot solutions are designed to revolutionize your business by enhancing customer interaction and automating repetitive tasks. By leveraging advanced technologies like Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning (ML), and AI frameworks such as Dialogflow, businesses can offer personalized experiences to their customers. As a trusted chatbot development company in US and other places, Prismetric ensures that businesses benefit from real-time responses, improved productivity, and 24/7 customer service.
With their chatbot development services, Prismetric integrates solutions tailored to specific industry needs. From lead generation to customer support, these chatbots reduce operational costs while improving customer satisfaction. Using platforms like TensorFlow and Rasa, they provide scalable, flexible chatbot solutions that streamline processes and boost overall efficiency.
Chatbots are the future
The chatbots have almost limitless potential and can prove to be an incredible addition to your business. Earlier, chatbot use was limited to providing customer support. Now with time, chatbots have evolved, and you can now use chatbots in every stage of the customer’s journey. Contact a top AI development service provider like Prismetric to unlock the full potential of a chatbot for your business.
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