Chatbot Development
What is a chatbot?
A chatbot is a software application used to conduct an on-line chat conversation via text or text-to-speech, instead of providing direct contact with a live human agent.
It is an artificial intelligence (AI) software that can simulate a conversation (or a chat) with a user in natural language through messaging applications, websites, mobile apps.
Why chatbots are important?
The time saving and efficiency derived from AI chatbots conversing and answering questions is attractive to companies looking to increase sales or service productivity.
- It helps in enhancing customer experience.
- It offers companies new opportunities to improve the customers engagement process and operational efficiency by reducing the typical cost of customer service.
- Chatbots are a smarter way to ensure that customers receive the immediate response that they are looking for without making them wait in a queue.
- It can be easily scalable during the peak business hours or and manage ’n’ number of customer conversations without additional customer service costs.
- The top potential benefit of using chatbots is 24-hours customer service.
How do Chatbots work ?
- Pattern Matching
- NLP ( Natural Language Processing )
- Algorithms
- AI and Machine Learning
How does NLP in Chatbots work?
NLP stands for Natural Language Processing. It involves two processes : Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG).
NLU is the ability of the chatbot to understand a human. It is the process of converting text into structured data for a machine to understand.
NLG transforms structured data into text.
For example, a user writes to a chatbot “How’s the weather in New Delhi today?”. To give a reply chatbot breaks down the sentence into Intents and Entities.
An intent is an action or a request the user wants to perform or information he wants to get.
An entity is a detail that compliments the Intent. It can be a location, date, colour, size, etc.
Intent and entities in chatbots are both essential to delivering what the customers wants and needs. In our example, “weather” is an intent and “today”, “New Delhi” are entities.
Some Chatbot building platforms
- Google Cloud Dialogflow
- IBM Watson Assistant
- Amazon Lex
- Azure Bot Service
- Converse.ai
Future of Chatbot technology
Accenture research says “Digital consumers prefer messaging platforms that have a voice and text-based interfaces”.
More and more brands are going to build applications in the future. Bots can collect data and analyse to take important actions. As per Gartner, “Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be a mainstream customer experience investment in the next couple of years”. 47% of organisations will use chatbots for customer care and 40% will deploy virtual assistants.
Chatbots will automate payments : Chatbots Magazine found out that 67% of US millennials said they are likely to purchase products and services from brands using a chatbot.
MasterCard has also launched a chatbot, especially for customer payments.
There are over 100,000 Facebook bots active on Facebook Messenger platform.
Chatbots are going to be the future. Having a deep understanding of your business requirements and accordingly implementing bots will greatly impact your customer journey and experience.
