How much time goes into developing a Messenger chatbot

The new millennials are a choosy lot. They no longer want to wait in long queues of an IVR, waiting on a customer service agent and want to get information real quick. Today’s consumers are tech savvy and like to do their own homework before they buy a product or avail a service.

Technology has introduced us to chatbots and they now play a crucial part in our day to day life. The tech-savvy millennials now look up to chatbots to give them answers on a range of topics from very basic to complex questions. The questions can be as simple as “How is the weather today” to “What features does my smartphone have”. The inherent natural language processing ability of the chatbots coupled with their interactive way to provide answers, everything makes it a great tool. The use cases of chatbots are many.

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According to Gartner, chatbots:

1)Can adapt their behavior based on experience;

2)They are not dependent on people for instructions and can self-learn.

3)They are able to come up with unanticipated results.

Before building a chatbot for your business, it is essential to do a thorough research and analysis of the business, to have a proper understanding of what is right for you and which technology suits your business most.

How to Choose the Right Chatbot for Your Business — Try answering the following questions yourself.

· What is your business type: enterprise, medium-large, SMB?

· What is your business goal: Is it customer support, retention, upsell, subscription, plain entertainment?

· The number of messaging platforms you’re going for: Facebook Messenger, Kik, Telegram, etc.

· What volume do you expect your chatbot to have: hundreds, thousands, or millions of users and/or conversations?

· Who’s your target audience, and where are they found?

· What business need will your bot fulfill?

· How much will it cost to make a chatbot?

· How will you market your bot?

Once you have identified the purpose of building a chatbot and the need it will serve, the next big question that arises in your mind is, how much time will be required to prepare a chatbot. The time required to build a chatbot for your business can range from a few hours to a maximum of 2–3 weeks, depending on the complexity of the project or function that you wish to automate and the option you choose to build a bot. The size of the company also matters. Smaller companies would not like to invest in too much time and money to build a chatbot.

We have listed three options you may choose from, to build your bot :

A) Buy a ready made solution — Just as there’s an App Store for iOS and the Google Play Store for Android, there are market places for bots, that solve specific business needs. You can try out one of these bots, that perfectly fits your own business. Such typeof bots are available on the Telegram and Kik Bot Stores. Slack doesn’t have a marketplace for bots,i.e. ‘Bot Store,’ but they do list all their bots in their App Directory together with all other tools.

You can search for chatbots across all current platforms and categories using Botlist, which is a catalog of bots. There are bots on Botlist ,which serve multiple purposes and run on multiple platforms.

While you can’t customize a ready-made bot and it may not meet 100% of your business needs, but the time required to build such a bot is least. Actually there is no time required at all. You may just browse through the catalogs of bots and choose one instantly which is closest to your business need. Small companies, whose chatbot is supposed to handle very simple functions, may opt for such a platform.

B)Build a Chatbot with a Bot-Developer Platform

With self-service platforms, you can easily build a bot by yourself. Some platforms require a certain degree of technical knowledge, while others let you build bots without writing any code.

Chatfuel and Motion.ai. are such examples of the second type. Using Chatfuel, you can write use cases by following tutorials, and do some testing later on. It lets you build chatbots for Facebook Messenger and Telegram, set up AI algorithms, and lets you integrate your bot with a number of third-party services.

For creating a chatbot with Motion.ai , all you need to have is a talent to draw a flowchart, and a chatbot can be created out of it. You can then integrate your bot with various messenger platforms.

The time required to build these bots is a little more than the ready-made bots, from a few hours to few days altogether. The complexity nonetheless is more, as you need to have an idea or starting point, to draw a flowchart which will guide in building the chatbot.

C)Develop a Chatbot from Scratch

There is a third option, where you can build your chatbot from scratch. And if programming isn’t your strong point, you can outsource your work to a software development team.

A chatbot for an existing chat service is simply a server-side app that need to connect with an API in order to function. To implement this server-side app, software development teams can use various technologies. The Ruby programming language is such a technology.

Let’s take a look at what is the time estimate of chatbot development in various scenarios:

Integration with one chat — the duration depends on bot complexity, but on average it takes 40–56 hours.

Creation of a communication interface

You can either use a Command language user interface or Natural language user interface. Depending on the size of the teams, the first option may take 40–56 hours to build a chatbot and the second option may take 120–160 hours.

Business logic

If there are web applications or API’s , already for your mobile apps, you may adapt the existing business logic. Depending on the amount of logic required, it may either take 120–160 hours on an average or to a maximum of 160–192 hours, if they need to create the logic from scratch.

Image source: www. chatbotslife.com

Final Word

The chatbot’s complexity and personality will eventually decide the timeline.

You may need a chatbot to handle marketing activities for your brand and a provide a bunch of functions, from customer support to natural language understanding. Variability, scalability, complexity, and personality of your chatbot will directly influence your choice between a custom or platform-based chatbot development. The more the complexity, the more is the time required.

The latest AI powered chatbots are the most complex ones, which can interpret the human language to deliver appropriate messages. Not only do they need to learn the behavioral patterns of individuals and take decisions, they also need to push promotional content to users depending on past history. They are no more limited to answering simple transactional queries or give some basic information regarding a product or service, in times when the company’s customer service agents are out of reach.

The team used to develop such bots may be typically between 4–6 people. Projects like that may take at least 2–3 months to implement.