Chatbots

Before creating a bot, you must define the purpose of the creation and what role it will play. An equally important point for business is to understand how chatbots can save time, effort, increase efficiency, or other benefits. Then, it is important to identify the goals that the business wants to achieve with the bot. The set goals will help to move forward and develop the business with changing needs.

Defining the audience will help to determine which platform will be used to create the chatbot. Chatbots can be internal and client ones. If they are client-centric, it should be deployed on the platforms most frequently used by customers.

The bot has to be smart enough to understand the question being asked and to give an answer. The interaction with the client must be accurate, and the output answers must solve the user’s problems. To do all this, you need to start by building a content model of the conversation that will help the bot to give detailed answers. The conversational interface will allow the user to tell the bot what it needs to do.

The development phase includes frontend and backend components. The frontend part refers to the conversational interface and interaction with the user. The backend part refers to the computations performed by the bot and the integration with other web services.

When creating a bot, special attention is paid to the design of chat conversations. Chatbots can provide both logical answers to questions, and simple answers on daily questions, depending on what the user asks.

The bot-script usually guides the user to the right task. Depending on the context, the script may or may not support NLP capabilities. If the bot is designed with NLP, the bot script will handle a wide range of custom input options.

Chatbots are user-friendly, taking into account all their needs and desires, and available 24/7.

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One of the key factors for the chatbot success is thorough training. To achieve the best possible result, it is necessary to constantly test the bot together with a revision of the NLU (natural language understanding) components. These components should be reviewed and improved from time to time to make it more accurate and interactive. Chatbot, who has the artificial intelligence and customer support function, should know what questions he will be asked and how to answer them. All information for his training can be taken from emails, FAQs, answers to customer communications, or provide the bot with a lot of similar information about the industry he will be working in.

Testing is an integral part of any product development. At this stage, the bot is tested, finalized, and tested again. Not only the code should be tested, but also the messaging process itself. After all, the chat is created for a certain platform, which may have its limitations and rules. It is also exposed to a small group of real end-users.

Once chatbots are almost complete, they need to be deployed in the host environment. For stable and correct operation, the hosted environment needs monitoring and support.

Some platforms require checking before publishing a bot, so you will have to verify it for further work.

Chatbots must not violate the privacy policy, must interact with users correctly to get approval for placement. Only after approval, you can put your chatbot on the platform.

Even after the product is released, work on it does not end. The bot needs constant support and timely training. As customers use the chatbot, it is desirable to monitor the result for improvement and future development. Developers monitor the correct execution of tasks, identify and correct weaknesses, and collect feedback from users to improve interaction.