This
blog will take you through a scrumptious journey of how to develop a chatbot .
For
knowing about chatbot please refer here .
Chatbots
are conversational bots that can be accessed either by voice or texts or both. We
can ask any type of queries, maybe anything about weather, time; you can
schedule appointments, set alarms or even ask some general knowledge questions
or mathematical questions.
But the
question comes how to develop this chatbots? Can a person with no coding skills, develop a chatbot?
In this
blog I am going to answer all of these questions with the best possible
explanation.
Let’s
start with the first question.
Can we develop our own chatbot?
Yes, we
can. Now the question that arises is why we would like to develop the chatbot?
Well,
let me help you then. If you are a businessman and want to handle your
customers through your website or social media sites, you can have a chatbot to
answer all of their queries regarding your company. Or you are a content writer
and have a website; you can have a chatbot on your website to interact with
your readers. And developing that chatbot is termed as Chatbot Skill Development.
Benefits Of Having a Chatbot.
 |
| Benefits Of Chatbots |
Before
building a chatbot we should identify the benefits of having a chatbot.
- There is no doubt that chatbot is going to be the most big thing in the future. According to an online survey in 2018, it was found that almost 50% Americans prefer chatbots when it comes to customer interactions. Hence having a chatbot can enhance your business.
- Not only in America, but also in European countries almost 30% people prefer chatbots over humans.
- In India maximum companies are adopting chatbot services. Almost 12% of all Indian websites contains chatbots for user interactions.
- The greatest benefit of having a chatbot is it is available 24x7. That is, at any place, any time we can access these chatbots. If we consider a customer-care center, we can get in touch with them with our basic queries and get them solved, even after the service center is closed. This is possible only due to chatbots.
- Around 85% of people in the entire world say that 24 hours service is the best. And it can be only provided using websites and chatbots.
- It is trustworthy (depends on your inputs) and it increases efficiency.
- It reduces time consumptions as it generally replies very fast, almost within 10 seconds (depending on your internet speed) hence it is reliable.
Ok, now we
know what chatbots are. And what are the benefits of having it.
Chatbots
mainly work on NLP (Natural Language Processing)
What is NLP?
The name
itself suggests that it is a method that processes natural languages.
Natural Language doesn’t mean only voice, but text too. It is actually the input of the user. The chatbots understands
the motif and the question of the user through NLU (Natural Language
Understanding) layer. This layer generally identifies the respective answer of
the question and outputs it.
The
below diagram briefly describes the working of a NLP layer.
 |
| NLP Layer |
Now let me answer the second question,
Can a person with no coding skills develop a chatbot?
My
answer to this question will be partially yes .
There
are many platforms that does not require coding for the development of the
chatbots. But Amazon Lex or Amazon Alexa Skill development requires a bit of coding knowledge. You should either know JavaScript or Python for developing Amazon
chatbots. Here we require a lot of coding when we develop the backend in AWS
Lambda. Having some web development skill is handy as well. Many of these codes are available in GitHub, hence basic knowledge of coding is enough just for editing the code. So, if you don’t
know coding you probably cannot develop Amazon Alexa Skills.
Developing a Chatbot
Before
we learn how to develop it, I would introduce some predevelopment steps that
are needed to be performed.
Determine
the goal of the chatbot.
Your
chatbot should have a goal. Whether you will develop your chatbot for business
or personal page, first set that. Then select the social site for which you
want to develop, either facebook, whatsapp, instagram, twilio or your website.
- Heap up
all you questions with respective answers
This is
the most important task you need to do while you develop a chatbot. You should
assemble all your questions in a single place with their respective answers. I
would also recommend you to group the similar type of questions in a single
intent.
Intents are the most important component because they try
to determine what the user wants. What are they asking for? In other words,
they capture the intent or goal of the user.
- Find the most suitable platform for your chatbot.
In the internet there are several platforms available for
building chatbots for free, but uploading the chatbots requires money. If you know the methods you can easily develop it.
I am listing some of the topmost platforms.
- DialogFlow
(By Google)
DialogFlow
(formerly known as api.ai) is a Google-owned chatbot developing engine.
It provides tool to develop different chatbots for your websites, apps, especially
for Google Assistant. Voice and conversational interfaces created
with Dialogflow works with a wide range of devices including phones, wearables,
cars, speakers and other smart devices.
This platform supports 14
different languages as of now, including Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese,
English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian,
Spanish and Ukrainian.
You can develop skills for
your Google Home too through this.
You just have to create a developer account in DialogFlow, and start developing the chatbot. Click in this link to register in dialogflow.
 |
| Dialogflow |
- IBM
Watson (By IBM)
IBM Watson is a
general question-answering computer system posed in natural language
processing. It was developed by IBM’s project research team led by principal
investigator David Ferrucci. It was named after IBM’s founder Thomas J. Watson.
But later they made it a
framework, and made it available for chatbot development. We can integrate the
chatbot with our facebook messenger, or our website. If you want you can
integrate it with other social media sites as well. We can even use the IBM
Cloud for storing our data. Here no coding is required for basic bots.
 |
| IBM Watson |
- Amazon
Lex (By Amazon)
Amazon Lex is a service for
building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text.
Amazon Lex provides the advanced deep learning functionalities of automatic
speech recognition (ASR) for converting speech to text, and natural language
understanding (NLU) to recognize the intent of the text, to enable you to build
applications with highly engaging user experiences and lifelike conversational
interactions. With Amazon Lex, the same deep learning technologies enable you
to quickly and easily build sophisticated, natural language, conversational
bots (“chatbots”).
Amazon Lex backend is mostly controlled by AWS Lambda. For this you need an AWS (Amazon Web Service) account.
 |
| Amazon Lex |
- Amazon Alexa (By Amazon)
Amazon Alexa is one of the most famous Virtual
Assistant. It is actually a cloud-based voice service especially developed for
Amazon Echo and Echo Show. Through this you can develop skills for your Amazon Alexa.
Then can publish them in Alexa Skills Store. This store is like Google Play Store, people can download your skill and use it whenever they want. Even you can use other
developed skills from the Skill Store.
This also requires AWS Lambda for its backend.
 |
| Amazon Echo |
Click here to see what type of skills are developed in
Amazon Alexa.
Note: This is only used for the development of chatbot
for Amazon Alexa not for any website
or social media sites.
 |
| Amazon Alexa |
- snips.ai
Snips is a AI Voice platform
for connected devices that animates product interactions with customizable
voice experience.
Snips is similar to Dialogflow,
but it runs on the edge without sending any data to the cloud. This maintains
our privacy. It is mainly beneficial for students, as snips.ai is the best for
their projects like smart mirror, smart refrigerator etc..
 |
| snips.ai |
- SAP
Conversational.ai
It is one of the most trusted
AI Voice Platform. It generally provides the best interface for our chatbots.
We can develop chatbots for any social media sites in many languages. It can
help you improve employee productivity, customer retention, and revenue . This
is specially build for business purpose.
 |
| SAP conversational.ai |
The
development procedures are different for each of the platforms. We can find the
tutorials in their official websites.
Basically we create intents, which actually contains the queries of the users. If the inputted question matches with the keywords in the intent, the platform calls the intent. Then the dialog related with the called intent is outputted either by voice or text. This is common for every platform, but the approach is different.
Thank you for reading this. Hope you have enjoyed.
See you in next blog.😊😊
See you in next blog.😊😊
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