Conventionally, it required extensive knowledge, skill and substantial coding, support, maintenance, and manual work to build chatbots from the ground up. Large amounts of time and money expended into building chatbots ultimately did not seem viable or profitable.  Time and resource intensive practices of developing chatbots has been a major impediment for smaller companies to effectively implement the technology along with a fierce competition for the scarce engineering talent pool to develop chatbots.

The problem of finding niche expertise and the cumbersome process in building chatbots is being resolved by the uprise of no/low code chatbot platforms that allow businesses to enjoy the customer service benefits of chatbots without draining resources. There are several frameworks or software development kits (SDKs) readily available necessary to build intelligent bots that drastically reduce the amount of code required to build chatbots thus democratising the chatbot technology.

The 7 Popular Tools To Build No-Code Chatbots

1. Power Virtual Agents

Power Virtual Agents is a SaaS offering by Microsoft to build chatbots that can be integrated with several Microsoft and third-party applications. PVA greatly reduces the need to have the infrastructure to maintain and deploy chatbots as Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Services does all the heavy lifting of providing a conducive environment to host the application.

Chatbots to handle customer service questions and inquiries internal and external to the organisation can be developed using Power Virtual Agents. Bot Framework and Azure Bot Service and Cognitive Services provide the technological foundation for Power Virtual Agents that are essentially SDKs that allow users to build chatbots with minimal coding thus making the technology available to citizen developers.

With the help of PVA, powerful chatbots can be built using a guided, no-code graphical interface that can be deployed for sales, HR, finance, customer service and virtually on all channels where customers need to be engaged.

2. BotCore

BotCore is an accelerator that enables organizations to train, build & launch customized conversational bots powered by artificial intelligence. Using “Cognitive Abstraction” it can leverage any AI service available today and will scale for future services. BotCore is a no-code enterprise-grade bot platform. It is fully deployable on both on-premise and cloud (Microsoft Azure) environments. Some important features of BotCore are:

1. Knowledge Graph: Build bot conversations with an integrated Knowledge Graph consisting of multi-functional nodes
2. Conversation System: BotCore uses Message Definition Language (MDL) to define bot responses
3. Agent Hand-off: Let the bot handle most user queries, while providing a seamless escalation to a human agent
4. The best of Microsoft technologies: BotCore can aggregate LUIS bots, QnA Maker bots, Power Virtual Agents and other third-party bots.

Learn More About BotCore’s features

3. Chatfuel

With over 46,000 chatbots created using ChatFuel, it is one of the leading chatbot platforms for Facebook Messenger that comes packed with integrations to several third party services. Sales activities, personalized marketing and automated support can be executed with Chatfuel’s chatbots which can be built without any coding. 

Chatfuel supports multiple languages and comes with Facebook Live Chat Website Plugin to embed Messenger bot for the website. Chatfuel is a desirable tool to build chatbots from scratch as it has an in-built guide to navigate through the process of developing a bot systematically. In addition, bot’s responses can be customized by adding content through hyperlinks. The chatbots on Chatfuel despite their versatility have limited A.I. and Natural Language Processing capabilities.

Some of the key features of Chatfuel include:

• Predefined bot templates and provision to create automated and personalized messages
• Bots enabled to send email notifications and attachments
• Payment gateway can be integrated chatbots
• Analytics Dashboard with several chatbot and business metrics

4. FlowXO

FlowXO is a popular platform to build chatbots for seamless communication and effective customer engagement across a wide range of channels. Chatbots by FlowXo have been incorporated on well-known platforms like Slack and can connect with over 100 different cloud-based apps. FlowXO provides a wide range of capabilities for chatbots, from simple chatbots to cognitive chatbots with artificial intelligence.

Chatbot widgets for websites can be built using FlowXo and can be integrated with suitable third-party platforms.

FlowXo provides the comfort of building chatbot using visual flow editor and conversing with users directly inside the chatbot platform. FlowXo also supports multilingual chatbots with Facebook and Slack integration, enabled to send emails and attachments.

5. Botsify

Botsify with its easy-to-use drag and drop interface allows users to build template designs for chatbot and create AI chatbots for websites and Facebook messenger without any coding. Botsify is used by some of the popular brands including Apple and Shazam to design their chatbots. Botsify is integrated with several services, including WordPress, Shopify, Slack, Alexa, Google Sheets, RSS Feed, JSON API and ZenDesk.

Botsify provides a comprehensive approach of design, development, launch and growth to building chatbots. Major chatbot content like messages, and menus are first designed which are followed by designing messages that trigger and enable chatbot to human handover. 

Botsify users can automate live chat sales, track sales leads through social media and collate user information. Botsify also allows users to create conversational forms, integrate with WordPress and has form fields that are easy to customize.

6. BotKit

BotKit is a great chatbot builder that has a semantic interface for holding conversations which empowers chatbots with capabilities that mirror human conversational abilities. BotKit allows users to manage real-time messages, monitor activity, provide detailed statistics and can also be integrated with the API to improve functionality.

Botkit includes a visual conversation builder, open source libraries and rigorously tested, robust code. BotKit while providing all the desirable features doesn’t involve any coding.

7. TARS

TARS is a chatbot builder with a drag-and-drop interface to create chatbots for Facebook Messenger and conversational interfaces for websites. TARS comprises several chatbot templates that are easy to edit and customize and provides ease of use with its zero coding interface. Chatbots by TARS are loaded with advanced chatflow logic and conversation analytics and are useful for businesses to generate leads and increase ROI in marketing efforts.

Following are some of the other interesting features of chatbots by TARS:

• Provision to export data to Excel/CSV
• File and Image Upload
• Integration with Zapier 
• Custom Chatbot Design and Branding
• Webhook/API Integration

Conclusion

Building Chatbots bot isn’t a complex task any more. Several players in the market are democratising the process of building chatbots by providing platforms that require no code to build chatbots. Several platforms provide some of the cutting edge features, augmenting the abilities of chatbots all done without a single line of code. If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our enterprise chatbot consultants for a personalized consultation.