
The bot should be designed with speech and natural language processing capabilities, in order to offer Q/A solutions to end users. It is also important to review all the design guidelines for stability and to check if they meet the requirements of the chatbot. Stage 1 – Plan: It is very important to have an in-depth understanding of the goals, processes and user requirements of the chatbot before starting development. Figure 1 highlights the stages of chatbot development.
#2018 VISUAL CHATBOT BUILDER SOFTWARE#
Similar to the process of designing any software or website, developing chatbot based software involves following a series of steps. AI chatbots can understand requests along with context, intent and emotion, making use of machine learning and deep learning techniques to become smarter, and conduct more elaborate, real-time conversations. AI chatbots: These chatbots act as artificial brains and use sophisticated cognitive and natural language processing capabilities.They are programmed to recognise certain terms and patterns, from which they can respond to the end user using pre-set answers. Rule based chatbots: These work like interactive FAQs.Chatbots can be classified into the following two categories. The ultimate purpose of a chatbot is to conduct a conversation that allows people to access the desired information with a high level of accuracy using a lightweight messaging application. It has also been predicted that the global chatbot market could reach US$ 994.5 million by 2024. Another report by Transparency Market Research mentions that the global chatbot market in 2015 was valued at US$ 113 million and the CAGR from 2016 to 2024 will be 27.8 per cent. A report from Radiant Insights states that the chatbot market will grow at a CAGR of 24.43 per cent in the period 2018-2022 due to the increasing popularity of various messaging services.

According to Gartner, chatbots will be involved in 85 per cent of all types of business-customer interactions by 2020. Another 34 per cent of the companies have already launched the pilot prototypes. Of these, ELIZA and PARRY, which were used for typed conversations, were most popular.Īs per the 2017 Global Human Capital Trends Report, 41 per cent of the chief executives of companies claim to have implemented chatbots already or to have prepared cognitive AI technologies to be implemented in the near future. The history of the chatbot is quite fascinating–various chatbots have been designed in the past, starting with ELIZA back in 1966, PARRY in 1992, A.L.I.C.E, Jabberwacky and D.U.D.E, etc. Today, chatbots are popularly accessed through virtual assistants like Google Assistant, Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana, Amazon Alexa, Samsung Bixby and even Facebook Messenger. The concept of the chatbot was proposed by Michael Mauldin in 1994 to define conversational programs. Chatbots also make use of natural language processing (NLP) and respond with the most matching keywords or similar patterns of action from a database. It is typically designed and used in dialogue systems for customer care applications or information-acquisition-cum-knowledge-discovery. Being a computer program, a chatbot is regarded as an example of artificial intelligence. A user can ask the chatbot a question or give it a command, and it responds by performing the requested action. It attempts to simulate the conversation or chatter of a human being through text or voice interactions.

A chatbot can be customised and used on Web browsers, smartphones and other popular messenger-based platforms like Facebook Messenger or Slack. The word ‘chatbot’ is derived from ‘chat robot’ which allows for highly engaging, conversational experiences, through voice and text. Let’s explore a few of the top open source tools for chatbot development.

Chatbots are also known as smartbots, interactive agents or artificial conversation entities. A chatbot is a computer program or embedded artificial intelligence that can conduct a conversation using auditory or textual methods.
