What Is A Chatbot?

A chatbot is a computer program that, via voice commands or text chats or both, simulates human conversation.

Chatbot, short for chatterbot, is a feature of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that can be incorporated and used by any major application of messaging.

In simpler words, and in general, chatbots are used as interfaces for knowledge retrieval, such as extracting product data. Whereas, virtual assistants, such as reminding you of meetings, handling your to-do lists, writing down notes, and more.

Also, there is a thin line between a chatbot and a bot. Here is how the thin line can be understood. Both chatbot and a bot are the same things – the bot is an automated tool design that is used to perform software-based tasks. However, the thin line is that chatbots are more into conversations. In addition, chatbots are a sub-genre of the bot world, which were built to communicate with humans in a conversational way

History Of A Chatbot

Without a doubt, chatbot and eCommerce have evolved together, but the real question is how has this happened? Who was the person that came with a thought of a machine responding like a human? Also, chatbot development cannot be denied in this era and in preceding ones too.

The history of chatbots had witnessed a total of 5 phases, which are explained under this heading. So, let’s have a deeper look at how chatbot was evolved?

ELIZA

In the history of computer science (MIT), It is known to be the first chatbot created by Joseph Weizenbaum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. However, the word 'Chatterbot' was coined in 1966. Therefore, when talking about Eliza; ELIZA works to replicate an answer using certain keywords from pre-programmed responses by identifying key terms or phrases from the input.

Let’s take an example; when a user says “I like sweets more”, Eliza picks up the word “sweets”, and will start questioning like “which of the top picks of chocolate do you like the most?”. Therefore, it creates a sense of user credibility and feels like a human being and not any virtual assistant.

PARRY

Parry is a natural language program that simulates a person's paranoid thoughts. This reasoning requires consistent misinterpretation of other motivations-others must be up to no good, they must have dangerous secret motives, and their investigations must be deflected into certain areas - via a dynamic system of perceptions, attributions, and "emotional responses" that Parry achieves, caused by shifting weights allocated to verbal inputs.

Also, Parry is the first to pass a Turing test; it was in the early seventies when human interrogators communicated through a remote keyboard with the software.

ALICE

It was created by Richard Wallace in 1995. The ALICE chatbot was able to use NLP (Natural Language Processing) as opposed to Eliza, which allowed more complex communication. The fact that it was open-source was groundbreaking. In order to build their own chatbots powered by ALICE, developers should use AIML (artificial intelligence markup language).

JABBERWACKY

The main goal of creating Jabberwacky was to “simulate natural human chat in an interesting, entertaining and humorous manner”, also, it was created by British programmer Rollo Carpenter. The project's stated goal was to construct an artificial intelligence capable of passing the Turing Test. It is designed to simulate human interaction and to hold user conversations. It is not planned for any other tasks to be carried out.

MITSUKU

Mitsuku is a chatbot formed by Steve Worswick from AIMLtechnology. It appears to be an 18-year-old Leeds, England, female chatbot. With several additions from user-generated conversations, it includes all of Alice's AIML files and is still a work in progress. She spoke, on average, over a quarter of a million times a day in 2015.

How Chatbot Works?

The work process of chatbots is designed distinctively and each of the methods portrays unique styling of working of chatbots. Moreover, each of the methods is helpful in their respective areas. The top 3 classifications of the working of chatbots are as follows;

Pattern Matches

Chatbots use pattern matches to group the text and the customers generate an acceptable answer. A typical structured model of these patterns is the Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML). Here is the most uncomplicated example of pattern matches


<aiml version="1.0"encoding="UTF-8"?>.
<category>
<pattern> WHO IS A VIRTUAL ASSISTANT? </pattern>
<template>A virtual assistant is generally self-employed and. </template>
</category>
</aiml>

Then the machine gives the following output:
Human: Who is a virtual assistant?
Robot: A virtual assistant is generally self-employed and provides professional administrative, technical, or creative assistance to clients remotely from a home office.

Natural Language Understanding (NLU)

The concept of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) lies on the basis of 3 points. In addition, here is the classification of the NLU which helps in understanding the working of a chatbot better.


Entities: to your chatbot, this basically represents a concept. It could be a payment mechanism in your eCommerce chatbot, for instance.

Context: It does not have the historical context of the user's text conversation when a natural language understanding algorithm analyzes a sentence. It means that, if it gets an answer to a question it was recently asked, it will not remember the inquiry. So, the phases are separately stored during the chat talk. Banners such as "Ordering Pizza" may be either. Or other parameters, such as "Pizza Hut: Restaurant," may be used. With meaning, you can easily connect expectations with the need to understand the last question.

Expectations: This is what a chatbot would do when an inquiry is submitted by the client. That, for different investigations, maybe the same. For instance, the aim was, "I want to buy a black pair of shoes" and "Do you have black shoes?" "I want them," or "show me a black pair of shoes," is the same thing: a list of black shoe stores. Therefore, a single command that is the identifying tag is seen by any user typing text; black shoes.

Natural Language Processing (NLP):

Natural Language Processing (NLP) chatbots find a way to transform the voice or text of the user into structured data. Which is then used to select an answer that is valid. The following measures include Natural Language Processing


Tokenization: A set of terms are divided by the NLP into tokens or linguistically symbolic bits of a different meaning in the application.

Thought Analysis: It will research and understand the experience of the user and, if possible, pass the inquiry to a person.

Normalization: To find out the typographical errors and common spelling errors that could change the intended sense of the user's request, this software model processes the text.

Named Entity Recognition: The chatbot program model searches for various word categories, similar to the name of a specific product, the address of the user or the name of the user, whatever information is needed.

Dependency Parsing: To find similar phrases that users want to convey, the Chatbot looks for the topics, verbs, objects, common phrases, and nouns in the user's text.

Why Do Businesses Need A Chatbot?

Chatbots have become an integral part of business development, and only in the future will the need for these AI-powered bots increase. In 2021, there will be about 85% of businesses will be using a chatbot for their businesses.
If you are still wondering why you should get a chatbot for your company, then here are the top reasons why a chatbot is needed for your company; and how a chatbot helps your business.

It is difficult, especially for small and medium-sized companies, to keep the business open around the clock. This means that when a client reaches out to your company, before business hours resume, they won't get an answer from you. They can send you an email or leave a voicemail on your computer, but most of their questions will go unanswered until the next morning when you open them again. This is where it is really important for chatbots. In one form or another, a chatbot will ensure that your company stays open all the time. Actually, it can do more than just answer questions from your client.

Chatbots are an automated solution that allows more customer questions to be dealt with by your company than ever. If the current customer solution is entirely operated by human power, then you are certainly limited to handling only a handful of customers because only two or three customers can be handled at the same time by a human agent. However, if you use chatbots, the company can quickly scale up its operations without having to worry about the growing number of customer chats and calls..

Chatbots are capable of holding interactions like a human agent does with clients. By sustaining a dialogue, they will keep the clients interested in a particular forum. If a web application is opened, the user is accepted in a non-intrusive way by the chatbot. The user would then be able to ask the chatbot detailed questions about a product or service.
The user is presented with responses from the database much of the time, but in a standardized way that copies human interaction. However, when the bot replies to the user instantly it automatically generates a relation of trust and increases the user interaction.

Szymon Rozga - the Practical Bot Development says; "Although conversing with a bot is not the same as speaking with a human, messaging a friend is the closest analogous experience. Since users are still getting used to bots, it is reasonable to take those interactions as samples of how a bot should behave; and it has become a necessity for a business"

Types Of Chatbots

When chatbots were evolving there was a lot of discussion about it. Therefore, it gained popularity just because in the shortest span. Some of the more sophisticated conversational applications decided to distinguish themselves from their competition with the introduction of natural language processing and various machine learning approaches.
However, here are the most-talked types of chatbots.

Skills Chatbots

It's a single-turn-type chatbot that does not require much understanding of context. It may simply obey an order to carry out an operation. For instance, with its speech recognition functionality, a skills chatbot can easily follow the command 'turn on the AC' as well as having to work quickly, a skills chatbot needs strong NLP features. Amazon's Alexa has great features for chatbots, but it is a bot that can be categorized into many kinds of chatbots.

Assistant Bots

Assistant bots need to be excellent at conversations and answering FAQs, like support bots. To sustain user interest, the chatbot must also be fun. Siri by Apple is the most popular example of assistant bots, which can not only support the consumer with many tasks, such as fetching the news, performing a google search, setting reminders, etc., but also responds funnily if the question is not understood.
Also, learn how to create a website chatbot for your website.

Support Chatbots

Support chatbots are designed to solve a particular problem and involve context awareness, a personality, and a multi-turn capability. A consumer should be able to walk through a business process and respond to a wide range of FAQs. Deep learning and natural language processing are used by most of the help chatbots to perform actions. For chatbots with support, speech recognition is optional.

In all sectors - particularly in retail, human resources, digital marketing, and healthcare - a support chatbot is always useful. In all these fields, the use of chatbots for consumer services is becoming a necessity as it saves the company money and increases the rate of customer satisfaction.

Use-cases of support chatbots:

  • Customer service bot
  • E-commerce bot with a recommendation engine capability
  • Food ordering bots
  • FAQ bots


Real Use Cases Of The Chatbots

Where there is a high need for chatbots in businesses, there shall be many use cases too. Chatbots can be helpful in numerous ways and in a number of areas such as customer service, sales, marketing, eCommerce, and more. Here are top use cases showing how can a chatbot helps businesses to grow;

  • Instant query solutions
  • Ticket booking
  • Inventory checking
  • Tracking orders
  • Gathers feedback
  • Maximum leads
  • Emails listing
  • Friendly conversations

With these uses of a chatbot let’s have a look at the real-life case studies, also, the growth with Botsify

The Success Story Of AutoBahn

Autobahn Indoor Speedway is America's top indoor go-kart racing facility that not only facilitates thousands of racers annually, but also offers community activities such as business events, meetings, and parties with a special location and experience. Autobahn offers a number of different fun-filled experiences, namely: Arrive & Drive, Junior Karting, Free Birthday Race, Company Events, Private Group Events, Axe Throwing, Arcade Games, Summer Camps, and Field Trips.

They sensed that this is the time to walk step-by-step with the need for a virtual assistant. Therefore, they came to Botsify with the purpose of a chatbot and explained the requirements.
In addition, Botsify helped the company with its need and purposed the purpose of a chatbot which are as follows:


  • First-hand information to the visitors
  • Respond to their queries
  • Redirect them to a specific landing page as per their need
  • Book appointments
  • Gather user information
  • Connect them with a customer representative
  • Help them provide location information of the nearest autobahn venue
  • Availability of private tracks and
  • Provide information regarding promotional offers and discounts

By opting for the chatbots with Botsify, AutoBahn gained:


  • 0-102,360 website chatbot users in 10 months
  • 0-8000+ leads with a chatbot in 10 months

Victorious Story of EFU LIFE ASSURANCE

EFU Life is Pakistan's pioneer and market leader in the life insurance sector and has made many important innovations for the insurance industry over the years. Their offerings are tailored to fulfill consumers' varying needs and deliver the best in financial services. Along with many other products and services offered, this industry giant pioneered the following products and features in Pakistan; Unit-linked products, Critical Illness Products, Education Planning Products, Inflation Protection Benefits, and Pension Plans.

This is the time to walk step-by-step with the need for a virtual assistant. Therefore, they came to Botsify with the intent of a chatbot and clarified the specifications. Furthermore, Botsify supported the company with its need and intended the purpose of a chatbot as follows;

  • Allow users to see the current product offerings
  • Information about the products
  • Customer support agent
  • Booking an appointment, acquiring information, or dropping their complaints by clicking on the given contact information
  • Sponsorship offers from other businesses and media houses

By opting for the chatbots with Botsify, EFU Life gained;


  • 0-1200+ leads with a chatbot in 8 months
  • Currently at 20000+ leads

Have a look at the real use cases of chatbot automation

How To Create A Chatbot For Any Business?

Chatbots are a very tangible example of working together between humans and machines to accomplish a goal. A chatbot is a communication interface that enables people and organizations to have conversations, and a chatbot has been developed by several organizations.

Organizations have several reasons for creating a chatbot, including acquiring AI expertise, communicating with consumers and optimizing marketing, decreasing the number of workers needed for customer service, disseminating knowledge and content in a way that users are happy with and, of course, growing sales.

In addition, in the easiest possible way let’s create a chatbot for your business.

Keep Your Purpose Clear

First of all, it is important to determine why a chatbot is needed, and what its purpose is primarily necessary to alleviate the pressure point of the customer. This way the customer interaction will be improved, therefore, keeping the purpose of a chatbot vivid is necessary.


Create The Conversation Flow

It is demanding and challenging to build a conversation within a chatbot. Not only you should build a persona that suits your brand personality, but the conversational interface should also be vivid, and a positive experience should be desired by the chatbot. Therefore, with the marketing or communication department, the conversation flow should not be created by the developer, but by a copywriter. It is important to establish the right flow of conversation for the right goal.

Opt For Right Chatbot Platform

There are several different chatbot platforms, ranging from platforms that allow simple FAQ chatbots to more sophisticated chatbots that take context into account. Such context-aware chatbots can give a lot of added value as they can provide the end-user with a positive experience.



Did you know with Botsify you can create a chatbot in 3 simple steps? To know more, just scroll a bit



It is necessary to determine whether to outsource or not once you have determined what platform to use. There are several chatbot developers out there that can support you, but the right solution may not be provided by every developer. It is therefore important to search and ensure that you work with the right developer for the chatbot.

Integrating The Chatbot

Building a chatbot is easy but integrating a chatbot is much more complex to incorporate the chatbot into the applications, but that's where the added value is achieved. If your CRM or database is linked to your system by the chatbot, and if anyone needs to alter, for instance, a phone number and the chatbot will say: 'Yes, give me your phone number, and I'm going to update the system for you' This is where you see the quality of operations, satisfaction, and the NPS going up.

Test The Bot

Developing is only one factor, as in any software development project, testing is a key component of the project. Fortunately, most of the organizations were checking the chatbot code. Chatbot developers, in particular, have stringent testing procedures in place. To ensure that anything can be correctly tested, these procedures include a testing environment, and acceptance environment, and a living environment. You can not only test the code of your own projects but also test the program you use.



Kelly Noble Mirabella rich thought on the use of a chatbot:

"Ironically, a lot of people think that they’ve never used a chatbot, they’ve never experienced it, when in fact they have. Because Siri and Google and Alexa and all those voice-activated speaking bots, if you will, those are actually audio chatbots"

How To Build A Chatbot Without Coding With Botsify?

The fully managed chatbot platform, Botsify is fully managed in real terms. With this platform, you can build a chatbot for your business, and that too without coding knowledge. Are you wondering how? Learn it now, it’s the easiest.

Register Yourself:

By adding minimalist information such as; name, email address, phone number, and business type you will be registered to access Botsify’s platform.

Log in:

Next, is to log in with your credential after adding the payment information. After this, you will land on Botsify’s dashboard, and guess what? You will get a 14 days FREE trial.


Go To Chatbot AI and Create a Story:

At the extreme left corner, there is a toolbar. Select the first icon "Chatbot AI" and tap on “story”.fter tapping on the the story, a new page will appear and there you can see a button "create a story" on the left.


Create A Story:

After tapping on the create a story, a new page will appear and now you can create a story. Add media blocks, quick replies, and more according to the efficiency of your bot. Then save the story by tapping “Save” on the extreme right top of the dashboard.


Test Your No-code ChatBot:

The last step is to test your bot. Tap at the “test your bot” at the right top and it will take you to a page where you can fully test your no-code chatbot with Botsify.


Chatbot Functionalities

Build a seamless chatbot and add creamy chatbot functionalities such as; media blocks, integrations, conversational forms, data store, chatbot menu, and more

Integrations

Integrate your chatbot with multiple platforms. After integrating, enable NLP in your chatbots to build dialog flow. Here are a few of the top picks:
Google sheets: save conversational forms response in google sheets without any difficulty.
Zapier: To automate your work, Zapier gives you the power to incorporate Botsify with hundreds of other applications.
Slack: A simple drag-and-drop user interface can be used by all our non-technical users to create conversation scenarios you always wanted via integrating chatbot with Slack.
Stripe: Connect your Stripe with Botsify and collect payment easily from the messenger chatbot. Let your payment queries be resolved within a blink.


Platforms

Botsify offers a number of platforms to facilitate its users, helps them in better engagement, and a lot more. Have a look at the best features of Botsify.
Website Chatbot: Increase conversions easily and get up to 80% more engagement with an automated website bot. With its page messaging feature, it interacts with the user and gains its attention.
Facebook Chatbot: Strengthen the connectivity with users and leverage your real-time response with an easy to create Facebook Messenger chatbot. Moreover, this feature provides an edge to acquire more leads.
WhatsApp Chatbot: WhatsApp chat automation can increase connectivity for enterprises and customers. Also, you can nurture leads and can build customer loyalty. Not only this but it's instant reply and the broadcast feature can help in upscaling the business.
SMS Chatbot: The SMS chatbot feature can be integrated with Botsify's other well-working integration that can help you to nurture new leads into profitable customers, boost ROI, and reduce staff costs.

Features

Botsify’s features are an extra addition to achieving a milestone in your business. The features are easy to use and easy to understand, here are a few for better understanding:
Conversational Forms: It is used to collect information from the user for better lead generations
Broadcast Messages: once your bot is connected with a Facebook messenger, you can broadcast messages to many users.
Media Blocks: The multiple attachments can be done with a story for attracting the users. The attachments are; audio, image, image slider, file, etc.
Chatbot Menu: You can view the catalog or menu over a single button, it is for ease of the users.

Ready To Use Chatbot Templates

Build your chatbot at more ease, view the templates which we have already created for you, If you find the template of your required field, select the template and see the results.

Food Delivery Service Chatbot:

This template is made to automate the delivery process, which includes ordering a meal from any food outlet. This chatbot gives several choices of food variety, addons, and shows you the invoice for the order. It includes the usage of stories, quick replies, media blocks, and conversational forms.

Flight Booking Chatbot:

This template is designed for the booking process, which includes flight schedules, ticket details, flight tracking, and seat availability. It includes the usage of stories, quick replies, media blocks, and conversational forms.


Event Management Chatbot:

This template is designed for managing events, which includes slot availability, package details, budget consultation, location mapping, decoration recommendation, and even size knowledge. It includes the usage of stories, quick replies, media blocks, and conversational forms.


Create A Chatbot With Botsify In 3 Steps:

Botsify, the completely managed chatbot platform, is managed in real terms entirely. You can build a chatbot for your company with this platform, even without coding skills, too. It's the fastest. Learn it now in 3 steps.

Sign In At Botsify

After signing up for Botsify add payment information. After succesfull payment , log in to Botsify’s dashboard and start working on the bot which botsify created for your ease.

Create A Story

The next is to create a story, for that go to Chatbot AI from the left toolbar and select “create a story”. Create your desired story, add media blocks, and save the story.

Test Your Bot

So now when you have saved the story it is time to test your bot. Click on “test your bot” at the right top and it will take you to a page where you can fully test your no-code chatbot with Botsify.

Chatbot Templates

Wedding Planner

In simpler words, and in general, chatbots are used as interfaces for knowledge retrieval, such as extracting product data. Whereas, virtual assistants, such as reminding you of meetings, handling your to-do lists, writing down notes, and more.

Legal Service

In simpler words, and in general, chatbots are used as interfaces for knowledge retrieval, such as extracting product data. Whereas, virtual assistants, such as reminding you of meetings, handling your to-do lists, writing down notes, and more.

Education Consultancy

In simpler words, and in general, chatbots are used as interfaces for knowledge retrieval, such as extracting product data. Whereas, virtual assistants, such as reminding you of meetings, handling your to-do lists, writing down notes, and more.

Insurance Assistant

In simpler words, and in general, chatbots are used as interfaces for knowledge retrieval, such as extracting product data. Whereas, virtual assistants, such as reminding you of meetings, handling your to-do lists, writing down notes, and more.

Order Food

In simpler words, and in general, chatbots are used as interfaces for knowledge retrieval, such as extracting product data. Whereas, virtual assistants, such as reminding you of meetings, handling your to-do lists, writing down notes, and more.

Digital Agency

In simpler words, and in general, chatbots are used as interfaces for knowledge retrieval, such as extracting product data. Whereas, virtual assistants, such as reminding you of meetings, handling your to-do lists, writing down notes, and more.