Chatbot Development

A chatbot is a software program for simulating intelligent conversations with human using rules or artificial intelligence. Users interact with the chatbot via conversational interface through written or spoken text. E.g. Slackbot, Facebook bots, etc.

In recent years, Chatbots have demonstrated the power and convenience of conversational interfaces. As of now, language is emerging as the interface in connecting brands with their users. Chatbots these days are being built to handle user requests, provide relevant information and be the friend one would look for to seek information.
So, if you believe the above to be important, then yes, Chatbots are very good.

Building a chatbot can be challenging, but with a keen eye for details, you can build a chatbot that offers great value. The plan to build a chatbot must also ascertain the purpose for building the bot, knowing what problem the bot is going to solve.
Chatbots can be built in two ways –

1. Rule-based approach resulting in hard coding.
2. Machine learning that necessitates streaming data for the system to learn on its own.

There are two ways to chatbots - the basic chatbots and then there are chatbots with AI (Artificial Intelligence) brains. If you have customers wanting to converse with chatbots that understand natural language, you will need bot that is rich in AI so it would learn and adapt to your user’s needs. The latter bot is called a Natural Language processing or NLP bot.

A flow-based chatbot is one that works by using a pre-defined (and reined in) conversational flow. In other words, they have their conversations already mapped out like a flowchart. When a customer triggers a conversation, the chatbot guides them through the conversation flow chart, step by step, almost like an If-else flow.

A flow-based chatbot’s conversations work toward pre-defined goals, which the bot can tell the user at the start of the chat. This means that from the onset, it’s clear to the user what they can achieve by interacting with the bot.
Plus, the bot guides the user through the conversation, supplying viable answers and asking closed questions.

So, we recommend Flow-based Chatbots in any scenario where you only want to direct your users to fixed goals and outcomes.

Flow-based chatbots can only address and answer the questions they have been programmed to answer. This can make them appear restrictive to the user and often, if the user does not find their query, it can lead to disappointment. 

At Hureka Technologies, we make Natural Language Processing (NLP) chatbots using Xyonix and IBM Watson.