How to Create a Chatbot Without Coding a Single Line
8 diverse chatbot development sites to help your bot speak its first words.
Chatbots are ready to succeed. If you think you have to hack days or even weeks to create a chatbot, you might be wrong. You don’t have to be aware of any coding skills. Immediately after big players like Facebook Messenger or Skype opened their platform for programmers many tools emerged. With this article I want to give you an introduction to mockup and overview of different tools to build your first chatbot.
Mockup
You’re having an idea? You want to show your use case? It’s definitely recommendable to mockup your story beforehand. First, you may find some bugs in your concept. Moreover, you will be able to explain a showcase to noninvolved people based on the motto: “fake it ’til you make it”.
botsociety.io
It’s very intuitive storytelling. Just insert what the user says and what the bot responds. Using the settings option, you can edit smartphone models, decide number of fans, and choose a profile picture, a page category and a welcome message. Additional features are buttons, images and quick replies. The whole story acts like a movie by pushing the play button. It can be shared by just one click and it’s possible to save the file as mp4 within the paid plan.
Tools
Each of the tools supports different platforms. Therefore, please keep in mind that it’s important to choose your platform wisely. Based on the huge range most of the tools make use of Facebook Messenger.
chatfuel.com
Chatfuel is focused on Facebook Messenger. You don’t need any coding skills to get started. It’s simple to create different logic blocks and link them to respective triggers. It offers great plugins e.g. human take-over and a minimalistic AI. In case you were recently starting with bots, I can recommend you this service.
motion.ai
Motion provides SMS, Email, web-chat, Facebook Messenger and Slack. Furthermore, it’s possible to link to (other) APIs and hook back to motion. Thus, it operates as a hub. The conversation is built with flowcharts and based on connectors and prepared modules. It just takes a few minutes to get familiar with the procedure.
Founder/CEO of Motion AI David Nelson’s “Chatbots Made Easy”
api.ai
api.ai is a great platform for developing chatbots. It has AI support and an intuitive interface. It requires only one click to assemble i.e. small-talk or weather features. On the one hand, it’s possible to run the bot exclusively on their servers. On the other, you can download a nodejs sample code to execute it on your infrastructure. To sum up, API.AI is an advanced service, being the reason why it’s more complicated to build a bot using this tool. Unsurprisingly, it got bought by Google a few days ago.
Featured CBM: API.AI “Small Talk” is Now Open! Why is it a Big Deal?
flowxo.com
Flow XO offers a graphical interface to build so-called flows which define how your bot will operate to received messages or audio. It has a huge list of integrations. As a consequence, it’s more complex than Chatfuel, but also a lot more flexible. Pretty amazing is their support on Messenger, Slack, SMS and Telegram.
botsify.com
They’ve an interesting approach to build chatbots. It guides you through 4 steps: design, develop, launch and grow. First, you’ve to design the content: messages, persistent menus, welcome messages and some more. As step 2, it wants you to link messages to triggers and setup curious modules like ‘Offer Human Help’. The launch step leads you through the review process, while the final step focuses on customer retention i.e. schedule messages, user lists, etc.
manychat.com
Manychat allows broadcast content from RSS feeds. Additionally, it’s possible to link to yahoo pipelines and broadcast everything you want. It supports scheduled messages, auto posting from RSS, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and has a basic mechanism to send specific answers to specific keywords. Watch their pitch to get a better understanding.
mindiq.in
MindIQ is a DIY Bot Builder platform for businesses focused on Facebook Messenger. You don’t need any coding skills and they make it dead simple for businesses to build bots. They follow a template approach. Currently, the templates available are media, commerce, and food tech. They also provide tools to link your business tools like Mailchimp to your chatbot.
Conclusion
There are many tools on the market. Every tool solves other problems and each of them uses a different approach for how to design user interaction. I really like the simplicity of Chatfuel and the 4-step-process of Botsify. Since all of these tools are quite new, I’m super excited and looking forward to seeing the direction that will be pursued and developed.
