How to create a chatbot for business

Lets take a look at the tools which are going to help build our bot fast and cheaply. To do that, you have to decide what tasks will your bot fulfil, on the base of what platform it will be developed (Facebook, Slack or other), you also need to set a server which your bot will use and choose the tools to create the bot.

All Chatbots are divided into two categories according to their functionality:

Depending on the type of a bot we need, we will choose the set of tools. In our previous article about Chatbots we covered services, which can be used to build a bot. Now, wed like to continue our investigation on the design instruments according to the bot complexity:

They are Bots of a Retrieval model. It uses the databank of replies and so-called heuristics, to choose an appropriate answer based on the context. The system doesnt create any new texts, it chooses one of the existing. These Chatbots has some characteristics:

To work properly Bot has to understand the question. It can be performed in two different ways: 

After the Chatbot understood the request, it can choose or form the reply. The replies can be static from the templates, or dynamic on the base of such sources as knowledge bases. The Bot uses them to get the list of possible replies, estimates them and chooses the best variant. Almost all Bots of this type has its arborescent structure that you use to design the interaction between Bot and a user.

Yet, if you want your Bot to develop its own answers you need to apply the deep learning algorithm, using chatbot development platform Chatfuel JSON API. It is a great platform to build interactive Facebook Messenger Bots without programming. The interface is really intuitive and has lots of special features. As far as Facebook Messenger is one of the most popular platforms at the moment, we suggest considering this service.

The next type is a combination of JSON API plugin and Gomix. The technology helps to create a Chatbot quickly integrating any third party API with JSON API plugin. Gomix is created with the help of Node.js and is based on a cloud, which gives you an opportunity to edit any file online in your browser. Using this plugin you can create various integrations with a server, thereby creating dynamic content or data transfer.

These bots are characterized with an Artificial Intelligence, so you dont need to be precisely clear when you talk to it. The Bot understands the language not only commands. And they get smarter with the time.

For more complicated interaction using natural language and processing bigger number of requests use Wit.ai/Api.ai/QnAMaker (open chatbot platform to process natural language)

Microsoft QnAMaker.ai is Chatbot software that can be applied for data treatment, that user provides, and that cannot be processed by Chatfuel.

These models are generative, which means more complicated. They dont work with predefined replies. They create replies from scratch. Generative models , as a rule, are based on machine translation methods.

Both approaches have benefits and drawbacks. Working with the replies base, Bot doesn't make grammatical mistakes. Yet, they can get a request, the answer on which they dont have. Generative models are smarter. They imitate the conversation of real people. However, it is very likely that they will make grammatical mistakes (especially in long sentences) and requires vast amount of learning data.

If you want to find a dog breed, the primary code processing is needed in order not to get a long list of all breeds. This processing will determine dog breed in a message and will indicate the word with a special tag. In such a case you can search for the tag applying the rule. WordNet can be used to determine basic definitions. You may have to add special libraries domain, like the medicine list if you create a Bot health service.