Developing a Chatbot? Do Not Make These Mistakes!

Hira Saeed
Chatbots Magazine
Published in
4 min readOct 8, 2016

Chatbots are all the rage. Every task is getting its own chatbot and it seems like they are now a thing! Some chatbots are all over the news, creating vibes and helping people. Some chatbots failed to do so. Why? Because they made a few mistakes that led them to failure. Such as even if your chatbot is developed for a particular task, it should be opened to address queries to keep the conversation going. I had a random chat session with a few chatbots and only 4 of them including Poncho, Mitsuku, RightClick.io and InsomnooBot impressed me. Now the question is; What kind of blunders you should avoid? Well, chatbots require your undivided attention and you should play a perfectionist while developing them. Here are the common mistakes you should avoid while creating your bot!

Think first. Code Later!

You have to be clear and specific before you start coding. You have an idea? It’s fine. Have you analyzed it? No? Well, this is a problem. Be clear about what type of bot you want to create. An AI powered one? Or a scripted bot? If you have decided to incorporate AI in your bot then you should consider tuning or molding your idea. Your clear perception about your bot will allow you to create a more interactive one. Once you’re done fine-tuning your idea, you’re good to proceed to the next step.

Less Spam. More Replies!

Your bot is the voice of your brand. Do you want it to keep saying “Sorry I’m unable to understand” in the answer of almost everything? Chats decide the fate of your bot. If it’s programmed to answer every query accordingly it’s a win-win. The fastest way to test a chatbot is asking it hard questions and it’s on your script you can put everything in it, all the answers to i love yous and I hate yous. Your bot should be well-versed. Replies that are too generic sound spam. Do not ever speak spam. Everybody hates spam. Here’s an example of one intelligent chatbot by RightClick.io that doesn’t believe in ignoring your messages or saying “I don’t understand what you mean”.

Chat session with RightClick.io Chatbot

Personify it!

Characterising your bot is important. It’s unattractive when you just call it a bot. Give it a smart character and a good name, just “bot” won’t work. Most of the chatbots that fail usually are not characterised because if it doesn’t have a character, it fails to interact with human (Yeah, we love to give names to all the things!). Give your bot a cool name!

Chat Session with Poncho Bot

Right people create Right Hype!

Be specific. Introduce your chatbot to the right audience especially influencers. If you have a chatbot that gives solutions to hair problems, why ask a tech savvy person to test it? This wrong step promotes discouragement in you and your team. You’ve created your bot with enthusiasm, go to the right people.

Conversational Dead Ends

Try to make the conversation attractive. After the hi’s and hellos your chatbot should be specific and ask the user about what he wants. No! Not exactly like this, you can make the questions more attractive like this “What hair problem are you having?” (If you have a bot that provides hair solutions) this will make the user talk to your bot and actually use it. The worst thing you can do with your chatbot is to make it close-ended. Why would you make your user feel like he is filling out a questionnaire?

Chat session with GetWeps Chatbot
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Published in Chatbots Magazine

Chatbots, AI, NLP, Facebook Messenger, Slack, Telegram, and more.

Written by Hira Saeed

Former Tech Journalist. Founder, CaterpillHERs and Tech Geeks. I write about business, startups and content creation. Send pitches at hello@hirasaeed.com

Responses (1)

What are your thoughts?

Hey Hira, cool that you’ve found Weps. These are some very good points you’ve made in this article.
We at weps totally agree that you should make the chatbot conversational and engaging.
As you mentioned in your article, you should put the product in…...