Chatbots

When you hear the word - “chatbot”, what involves your mind? We hear, and use chatbots nearly everyday in our daily lives. In fact, according to a report released by Forbes, three in five millennials have used chatbots at least once in their lives. But to several , this technology still remains an alien concept. Hence, let’s start off this blog from the basics as we further break down into the mechanisms and workings of AI chatbots and guide you into building the best chatbot for your business!

What are chatbots ?

Chatbot technology may be a designed tool powered by the principles of AI (AI), acts as a simulator of human conversation for the aim of automating a business process. Chatbots facilitate user interactions when placed with  the messenger applications that work as a platform for supporting the bots.

Like Siri for popular brands, chatbots are rising quickly as a new “voice” in consumer communications. These chatty computer programs answer any texts effectively carrying on quasi-conversations with the humans (your current and potential customers) on the opposite end. Thanks to advances in tongue Processing (NLP) and AI (AI), these bots have stronger conversation abilities than ever before.

Chatbots are everywhere!

Bots allow you to use the channel preferred by your customers, employees, and stakeholders to speak with you. The world has moved to a text-message era. Chatbots allow you to pinpoint your queries and obtain relevant answers instead of traditionally using scrolls and click-to-find the knowledge you're trying to find . Of course, bots eliminate the necessity for traditional call channels, inconsistent customer service and wait and drop times. You can integrate these chatbots on the website or any other platforms to get your chatbot online!

How do Chatbots work?

A chatbot acts as an intermediary that imitates human conversations by initiating live chats instantaneously and responding to the user queries at every point in time.

The working of all the chatbots today are mainly based on this model: 

 

• Knowledge Base/ CMS :
  Real-time, personalised customer experience.
  Universal contact accessibility and personalisation.
  Ability to reach and retain customers.

• NLP Layer :
  Mapping the given input in the natural language with useful representation.
  Analysing the different aspects of language.

• Data Store :
  Data required to train the bot.
  Users chat comes to the bot once it is deployed.

There are a couple of different ways that chatbots can be programmed. The most rudimentary form is rules-based. The Rule-based approach requires heavy coding, time, resources and money. Rule-based Chatbots only respond to specific commands and are basic in nature and functionalities.

Bots have evolved from that to incorporating Natural Language Processing which translates common language into a form a bot’s system understands, also as Machine Learning that permits the chatbot to find out from it’s own experience and helps you deliver a better customer experience. Hence, to create a full-fledged chatbot manually, you'll need to program these AI applications in it. While making smart chatbots, a builder has got to comprise conversational dialogue training. Such dialogue training is completed with the assistance of AI , hence the name “AI chatbots”. The building process of all AI chatbots is innovatory and comprising of these three protocols -

 

         

• Data processing – Data processing is basically a multi-step natural language processing workflow to correctly recognise and infer free input text. This process requires tireless engineering efforts when the input is multi-line or multi-objective. 

• Context - This helps the program to learn the interdependence between dialogues and the course of actions so that chatbots can drive the conversation in the right direction. This thing keeps the availability of previous chat in check, in order to build a knowledge graph.

• Chatbot training– Providing training to learn new conversations at all times to improve chatbots performance with the help of unsupervised methods based on machine learning techniques. 

Another approach to create bots would be choosing services which render you a substructure to create your chatbots on, without the necessity for any coding or programming. In this process, a bot builder uses one single code which will be employed by all, in the least the platforms available. They contains all the required and advanced elements pre-built within the substructure that allows you to build a chatbot that stands call at the competitive market out there. Chatbot building is not any longer rocket science and has been made tons easier through several chatbot platforms.