Chatbot Design Archives - BotCore

7 Tools To Build Chatbots Without Coding

Abhishek Shanbhag — Fri, 19 Apr 2019 15:39:43 +0000

7 Tools To Build Chatbots Without Coding

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:

Knowledge Graph: Build bot conversations with an integrated Knowledge Graph consisting of multi-functional nodes
Conversation System: BotCore uses Message Definition Language (MDL) to define bot responses
Agent Hand-off: Let the bot handle most user queries, while providing a seamless escalation to a human agent
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.

The post 7 Tools To Build Chatbots Without Coding appeared first on BotCore.

7 quick tips for designing a chatbot personality

Abhishek Shanbhag — Wed, 20 Feb 2019 12:52:00 +0000

7 Quick Tips For Designing A Chatbot Personality

One of the key factors for creating better conversational user experiences (CUX) and driving chatbot user adoption is the chatbot personality. Having the right personality enables the chatbot to conduct human-like, rich, personalized and relatable conversations with users and establishes an emotional connection with the user.

If the chatbot is built for a customer-facing function, its personality should ideally mirror that of your company’s and should be tailored keeping the end-user in mind. This is crucial as your bots are a representation of what your brand stands for and the experiences you want to deliver to your customers.

Humans are usually hard to please but can be frustrated easily. Hence, your chatbot’s personality should be consistent at every stage of the conversation – right from customer greeting, query handling, providing information to conversation sign-off.

7 quick tips for designing a chatbot personality

understand the persona of your target user

When designing your chatbot personality, keep in mind the demographic, age group and other key personality traits of the end-user the chatbot interacts with. For instance, if the majority of your end-users/customers are between 25 – 40 years, giving the chatbot an adolescent-like persona isn’t the best fit. Understanding the personality of the audience, their oft-used colloquial/slang language, verbatim, habits, mannerisms, interests, etc. can help in tailoring the personality of the chatbot to the customer base.

purpose of the chatbot

It is very important to design the personality of the chatbot according to its purpose. If the chatbot is built to conduct serious conversations like handling customer complaints or helping customers with time-sensitive actions, the chatbot should be efficient and straightforward with questions and responses. Trying to be clever with witty responses is the last thing the chatbot should be doing in such a situation.

brand tone of voice

Brands often use a specific Tone-of-Voice in order to successfully communicate their personality to the consumer. Maintaining a consistent tone of voice across all platforms of communication such as social media, marketing brochures, websites, etc., helps establish how the consumer perceives the brand.

Similarly, when developing a personality for the chatbot, it is important to factor in the tone-of-voice since users tend to perceive the brand through the chatbot. Maintaining consistency between the brand tone of voice and the chatbot’s use of it will inculcate user trust.

design chatbot personality at a country level

One of the typical strategies used when rolling out chatbots in multiple countries and languages is building the chatbot personality at a global level. This is not only incorrect but also risky for a chatbot roll out.

Cultures differ with regions. Some conversations that are polite in one country aren’t deemed the same way in another country. The word “crazy” might sound funny in the UK but it’s offensive in the US. So, it’s very important for Conversational Architects to build a chatbot personality at a country level than at a global level.

This means having a single Conversational Architect for a multilingual chatbot wouldn’t be enough – even if he/she has an exceptional cross-cultural understanding. Having a cross-cultural team of Conversational Designers is a better bet. This will help to bring in the flair of language in conversations which might be very locale-specific at times.

Learn More: Multilingual Chatbots: Benefits And Key Implementation Considerations

the greeting/opening a conversation

The greeting or the first message (first interaction) the bot sends to the customer is a crucial element of conveying the bot’s personality. Ideally, the bot should not only introduce itself but also convey the different services it offers. Instead of greeting with open-ended questions like “How can I help you”, the bot should send specific messages like “I can help you with raising an HR ticket, answering common HR questions, or connecting with an HR agent”

There are several ways of opening a conversation – “Hello”, “Hi”, “Yo”, “Greetings” etc. and all these reflect different personalities.

handling unexpected and unknown questions

Even when a human asks the bot a random question or something that has nothing to do with your offerings, the chatbot must still be able to offer a reply, no matter how rudimentary the question is. This characteristic, in turn, helps the human form an emotional connection with the chatbot. The chatbot should also have multiple none-intent responses. Sending a standard “Sorry, I didn’t get that” response every time a user asks an unknown question leads to bad CUX.

humour

Just as in everyday social interactions, humor tends to have a positive effect on how humans perceive conversations. It helps engage the user, especially in interactions or processes that may be long and arduous. A chatbot that is capable of humorous parlance helps the human user get more involved in the communication and perceive the chatbot as an emotionally intelligent entity. With the help of machine learning and NLP, enterprise chatbots can be trained to recognise humorous expressions, assess the user’s mood and respond appropriately.

conclusion

Designing a personality for your chatbot seems like a lot of work, but a chatbot with a great personality ultimately enhances the user experience for your customers who interacts with it. This, in turn, promotes greater user adoption, customer experience, and sales.

If you’re interested to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our chatbot consultants.

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