How To Develop a Chatbot From Scratch

This article will give you the resources and information you need to build or improve your chatbot.

Chatbots are artificial intelligence systems that we interact with via text or voice interface.

Those interactions can be straightforward, like asking a bot about the weather report, or more complex, like having a bot troubleshoot a problem with your internet service.

Here are some tutorials to get you started:

• If you are a beginner, read articles on Chatbot Magazine or start with “The Complete Guide To Chatbots — Development To Promotions.”
• Prepare a chatbot conversation — “How to design a conversation for chatbot?” and “Design Framework for Chatbots.”
• For building a chatbot, read “The Complete Guide To Bot Frameworks” and “14 most powerful platforms to build a chatbot.”
• For business — 100 Best Bots For Brands & Businesses
• For making an AI based intelligent chatbot — “How to make chatbot intelligent?”
• NLP & Machine Learning Tutorial with Code & Github: “Ultimate Guide to Leveraging NLP & Machine Learning for your Chatbot”

We have written this answer for a generic chatbot which can be published on any platform such as Facebook, Kik, Slack, Telegram or website.

The following steps will be helpful when developing a chatbot:

1. Identify the opportunities for an AI-based chatbot
2. Understanding what are the goals of building a chatbot
3. Designing a chatbot conversation
4. Building a chatbot using frameworks or development (non-coding) platforms

1. Identify the Opportunities For an AI-Based Chatbot

Before building a chatbot, you should first understand the opportunities for an AI-based chatbot.

As companies consider how best to apply new Bot technologies to their business, they need a way to think about which types of work can be automated or augmented by Artificial Intelligence solutions.

For a particular type of work activity, Artificial Intelligence solutions can be considered based on two criteria:

1. Work Complexity
2. Data Complexity

This dual analysis of work complexity and data complexity results in four primary types of activity models:

• Efficiency
• Expert
• Effectiveness
• Innovation

For a detailed account on “A Framework For Identifying Chatbot Opportunities,” you can visit Successful Bot Strategies For Your Business.

When the designer knows why the chatbot is being built, they are better placed to design the conversation with the chatbot.

2. Understanding the Goals of Customers

To be more specific, understand why the client wants to build a chatbot and what the customer wants their chatbot to do. Finding answers to this query will guide the designer to create conversations aimed at meeting end goals. When the designer knows why the chatbot is being built, they are better placed to design the conversation with the chatbot.

3. Designing a Chatbot Conversation

For designing a chatbot conversation, you can refer this blog — “How to design a conversation for chatbots.” Chatbot interactions are segmented into structured and unstructured interactions. As the name suggests, the structured type is more about the logical flow of information, including menus, choices, and forms into account. The unstructured conversation flow includes freestyle plain text. Conversations with family, colleagues, friends and other acquaintances fall into this segment. Developing scripts for these messages will follow suit. While developing the script for messages, it is important to keep the conversation topics close to the purpose served by the chatbot. For the designer, interpreting user answers is important to develop scripts for a conversational user interface. The designer also turns their attention to close-ended conversations that are easy to handle and open-ended conversations that allow customers to communicate naturally.

4. Building a Chatbot Using Frameworks or Development (Non-Coding) Platforms

Non-coding platforms — I have been making chatbot prototypes as a reference for our technical team at Maruti Techlabs. I have mostly used Chatfuel and API.ai. But I have also explored Motion.ai, Chattypeople and botsify.

Chatbot Platforms

You can read about the chatbot platforms in this blog — 14 most powerful platforms to build a chatbot. For those who don’t want to go through the exhaustive blog, here’s the list.

1. Chatfuel — It provides features like adding content cards and sharing updates to your followers automatically, gathering information inside Messenger chats with forms, and letting users request info and interact with your bot via buttons.
2. Botsify — Botsify uses a drag and drop template to create bots. Features like easy integrations via plugins, Smart AI, machine learning and analytics integration are also available.
3. Flow XO — This is the only chatbot platform to provide over 100 integrations. It boasts an easy-to-use visual editor. It also provides many pre-built templates for a quick start.
4. Beep Boop — provides an end-to-end developer experience that allows users to focus on building great bots. Beep Boop is more geared towards providing the best and easiest way of creating slack bots.
5. Bottr — gives you an option to embed your bot on your website. You can also add data from a Medium, WordPress, or Wikipedia site for better data coverage.
6. Motion AI — to visually build, train, and deploy chatbots on FB Messenger, Slack, Smooch, or your website. It lets you diagram your conversation flow like a flowchart to get a visual overview of the outcomes of a bot query.
7. Chattypeople — has predefined chatbots ready to start-off. The website has templates for e-commerce, customer support, and food business. If you select on e-commerce chat bot you only have to add Products, Q&A, and some general settings.
8. QnA Maker — Microsoft has created QnA bot in which you have to share the URL of your FAQ page and the bot will be created in a few minutes using the information on the FAQ page and structured data.
9. Recast.AI | Collaborative Bot Platform — enables you to train, build and run your bot. Creating and managing your conversation logic with Bot Builder and visual flow interface helps you set up responses very quickly.
10. Botkit — includes a variety of useful tools, like Botkit Studio, boilerplate app starter kits, a core library, and plugins to extend your bot capabilities.
11. ChatterOn — The platform helps you build the bot flow and setup the AI by entering a few examples of the expected conversation between the user and bot.
12. Octane.ai — They have pre-built features make it easy for you to add content, messages, discussions, filling out forms, showcasing merchandise, and more to your bot.
13. Converse.io — It is integrated into Multiple Platforms, includes complete User, Request & Conversation Tracking and has its own NLP parsing engine.
14. Gupshup — Unlike plain-text messages, GupShup’s innovative smart-messages contain structured data and intelligence, thus enabling advanced messaging workflows and automation.

Code-Based Frameworks

Code-based frameworks require programming languages, but they provide the flexibility to store-data, produce analytics and incorporate A.I.

The best code-based frameworks for developing a chatbot are Microsoft bot framework, Wit.ai, API.ai, and Aspect CXP-NLU.

In conclusion, chatbots are the future. Everyone should be ready to integrate one with their business. With so many chatbot platforms at our disposal, it has become extremely easy to build a bot. It’s safe to say — a chatbot revolution coming.

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