Chatbot Development: What you Need to Know (Updated)
Chatbots are trending worldwide. The value they provide in the form of support representatives and virtual assistants is seamless. Alexa, Siri, Cortana, all of them are a version of chatbot – the prime examples that you can easily see in day-to-day life. It has led to a substantial rise in the demand for chatbot app development as companies prefer custom bots that can perform specific functions.
What is a Chatbots?
A chatbot is a programmed bot that simulates human-like conversation. It conducts online conversation in the form of text-to-speech or text-to-text. Chatbots eliminate the need for human intervention and can function on their own.
They are based on a superior, developed dialogue system which enables them to learn and understand like human beings.
Chatbot application development, therefore, entails designing custom chatbot apps for talking with users. Every company has different requirements for chatbots to work with multiple use cases.
What is Chatbot Used for?
Chatbots are being used in various fields as of this date as customer care executives, entertainment, personal assistants, etc. Customer care chatbots in the banking sector are effective and efficient. They enable employees to work on more important tasks rather than having them answer mundane queries.
Consumers are becoming tech-savvy by the day. In fact, 87.2% of the users had a positive or a neutral experience with chatbots. People prefer AI chatbots over humans as they are more responsive and provide quick reponses.
Checkout Top 13 Chatbot Platforms for Building Virtual Bots in 2021
Today, chatbots are used for various purposes. Some of them include:-
- Customer service
Most companies are hiring chatbot development solutions providers for building chatbots that can answer customer queries, respond to common complaints, redirect customers to respective personnel, and so on. It improves the entire customer experience. - Ticket bookings
Today, a lot of companies hire chatbot app development services to enable customers to make bookings for travel, entertainment, doctor visits, and more using chatbots. It saves a lot of time and allows customers to reschedule their bookings and cancel them as well without human intervention. - Find products
Chatbot applications also help to find products, recommend products, and determine whether products are in stock or not. Customers can directly interact with the chatbot and ensure the availability of products without searching on the website.
Apart from these three, chatbots are capable of accepting payments, returning products, processing refunds, collecting customer data, and much more. It depends on how the organization wants to use the chatbot.
There are some amazing chatbot use cases as well. Like the one below.
What is an Example of a Chatbot?
At the Wimbledon 2018, IBM launched Fred, an Artificial Intelligence chatbot that shot all the Facebook updates about the tournament. And guess what?
Fred was the showstopper at Wimbledon. That is also because of how immensely important the chatbot had been for the organizers. Directing guests, telling them how to make the most of Wimbledon and taking care of the reservations. A legendary digital feat for the event.
And why only games? Chatbots are taking up glamorous jobs too. The fashion industry is bustling with chatbots powered by Artificial intelligence that offer style tips to followers. Airlines, hospitality, even manufacturing – chatbots are taking things by nothing less than a storm.
The prime example of chatbot is Siri and Alexa – both of them act as virtual assistants. They respond to the user’s questions and provide answers. People can ask them to set reminders, play music, call contacts, and whatnot. As AI advances, these chatbots learn from their surroundings and get better at communication.
How is a Chatbot Built?
The traditional idea of developing a chatbot was to build a system of ifs and then wherein all the possible ways of saying a thing were studied and loaded. Newer technology realizes how wasteful that process could be. The current theme is to use ‘intent recognition and build a responsive system around word associations.
For example, if you ask Google to book a hotel room for yesterday, the chatbot would instantly think that such a request is invalid and convey the same to the asker. The sophistication of modern chatbot technology lies in knowing what can’t be true rather than knowing what all can be true.
Chatbots, thus, need to have a common worldview – they must develop common sense by learning from their surroundings. Microsoft’s Tay made the classic mistake of not understanding this perspective.
The Chabot picked user’s comments and drew word associations. But some of them were racists and offensive. It was a total disaster for the big giant.
Therefore, a chatbot development company has to be highly careful while building the bot. They need to define the steps clearly. Identify the requirement for the bot (purpose), outline the bot map to understand what it would respond to, find the right technology stack and then develop it.
So the point to be made here is that it is easy for a program to go wrong. The developer has to keep an understanding of what chatbot technology is and how to keep it under the control of a human after all.
There are several chatbot development applications as well that enable developers to build drag-and-drop bots. These apps don’t require any programming knowledge. Anyone can build a bot with a little bit of programming knowledge.
Chatbot technology is one of the most trending tech topics of the time. Businesses are looking to benefit from this sophisticated system which could help them communicate to the point and at the point. It is said that the technology could help save a whopping $8 Billion by 2022 for businesses.
That includes eCommerce application development, saving on human errors, crispier business operations, etc. There is a long way to go before we reach the absolute peak of chatbot technology, but the fact that people and industries are more open-minded towards it is a step forward in the right direction.
BoTree Technologies is a leading chatbot app development company that enables companies to get the most benefits from a chatbot. Consult with our experts today.
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