AI Chatbot Tutorial
In this artificial intelligence chatbot tutorial you will learn everything you need to know about ai chatbots. Below table of content will give you an idea about all the topics covered in this tutorial. I would suggest you to spend some time and read the end to end tutorial for a complete understanding, though you can directly jump to each topic by clicking the link from table of contents.
Let’s get started!
Table of Content – AI Chatbot Tutorials
What is a chatbot?
In simple words, chatbots are computer programs that interacts with humans (or other computer programs) via:
• Voice
Or
• Text
Chatbots are also called as Conversational Agents, Chatterbot, Talkbot, IM Bot, Artificial Conversational Entity etc.
Do you connect to the question that most of us would have asked to Siri, Cortana, Google, Alexa etc.… “How’s the weather today?”
And we get a weather report either by Voice or Text reply, that’s pretty much a Chatbot in basic sense.
Chatbots have been evolved from the traditional rule based bots (like the weather report) to a more complex interactive talking bot or a chatbot online using artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies.
If you have noticed most the websites nowadays have a chat box popping up as soon as we enter the website.
Something like the below:
These are basically the chatbot online, you will see online chatbots not only in websites but also in various messaging platforms, inside an application etc.
Now that we know what is a chatbot, the next question is what is the importance it. Why companies spend money on chatbot development.
Let’s look into some of the use cases of ai chatbot.
AI Chatbot Use cases or Future of chatbots.
The importance of chatbots are increasing nowadays than ever before. Messaging is the one thing people do more than anything else on their phone.
Eventually messaging apps overtook social networking apps. If you remember in 2014 Facebook launched its independent messaging app (Facebook Messenger), separated from their social networking Facebook app, to leverage the complete potential of messaging.
More than 2.5 billion people have at least one messaging app in their smartphone like Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, iMessage, WeChat etc.
So companies use these messaging platforms to engage with their customers and increase the customer satisfaction.
There comes the importance of conversational ai bots.
There are chat bots available with the capabilities of making initial conversations with a human being and can go up to until he/she makes the final purchase. AI chatbot can engage proactively with visitors who are dropping off (from websites, apps, messaging platforms etc.) or are closer to making a purchase.
For example Pizza Hut and Starbucks have Facebook Messenger and Mobile app chatbots respectively, capable of taking online orders over a text or voice. It’s also capable of telling you the total cost of your order along with the estimated delivery time.
This might have reminded you of calling customer support agents and placing your order. Conversational Commerce and the Conversational Customer Service are the two major sectors where ai chatbots are being implemented rapidly.
There are 100s of such bots are available across various industries and categories. If you need any information or assistance in terms of developmet or implementation of ai chatbot on any of the below category, then asKeygeek.com can help you! ASK here!.
- AI Chatbot for Analytics
- AI Chatbot for Communication
- AI Chatbot for Cryptocurrency
- AI Chatbot for Customer Support
- AI Chatbot for Developer Tools
- AI Chatbot for Education
- AI Chatbot for Entertainment
- AI Chatbots for File Management
- AI Chatbots for Finance
- AI Chatbot for Food & Drink
- AI Chatbot for Health & Fitness
- AI Chatbot for HR
- AI Chatbot for Lifestyle
- AI Chatbot for Marketing
- AI Chatbot for News
- AI Chatbot for Office Management
- AI Chatbot for Personal
- AI Chatbot for Productivity
- AI Chatbot for Shopping
- AI Chatbot for Social & Fun
- AI Chatbot for Sports
- AI Chatbot for Task Management
- AI Chatbot for Travel
- AI Chatbot for Utilities
Now that we learned what is a chatbot, chatbot uses and its importance. Let’s have a look into chatbot technology and chatbot development.
How does Chatbot works?
Chatbots use various technologies to function or mimic exactly as a human does. Predominately chatbots uses Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and NLP (Natural Language Processing) technologies to give a more humanly engagement.
NLP is the same technology used by the earlier days’ virtual assistants like Siri, Google Now, Cortana etc.
AI Chatbot Development
Chatbot development can be considered as the 3rd era of programming or software development.
Websites >>>>>>> Apps >>>>>>> Chatbots
First it used to be the era of Websites and web development. Websites deveopmet does not require much of explanation; all that you see on web are mostly websites including asKeygeek.com where you read this article.
Then came the era of Applications or Apps. Can you imagine a smartphone without Apps? The technology columnist David Pogue rightly said, the newer smartphones can be nicknamed as “apps phones”.
And here comes the third era, the Chatbots, like how applications are developed on different platforms like Android, iOS, Blackberry OS etc. Chatbots are also developed on various platforms. We will discuss about bots Publishing Platforms below.
“First there were websites, then there were apps. Now, there are bots.” – Dev.Kik.Com
As I mentioned earlier, chatbots can operate from websites, in apps, messaging platforms etc.
Here we need to understand 3 terminologies or basic concepts:
1. Chatbot Publishing Platforms
2. Bot Development Framework (Coding required)
3. Bot Development Platforms (Non-coding)
As we know in case of Apps, they are developed for Publishing Platforms like Google Play Store, Apple App Store, Blackberry World etc. using Android, iOS, Blackberry OS respectively.
Same way Chatbots are also developed for various publishing platforms. As of writing (Sep 2018) this tutorial, there are around 21 various Chatbot Publishing Platforms are available, where users can access the chatbots.
I don’t want to make this tutorial very long by including the list of chatbot publishing platforms, however you can have a check on all the chatbot platforms from the link below.
21 Chatbot Publishing Platforms
Let’s move on to the 2nd and 3rd points:
As the name says ‘Bot Development Framework’ & ‘Bot Development Platforms’ are for the chatbot development purpose.
There are two ways in which chatbots can be developed, either by hard-core coding or using bot development platforms with minimal or no coding, like drag and drop features etc.
Bot Developers and coders use the development framework to create bots from scratch using predefined functions and classes.
Below are 3 commonly used bot development framework by developers.
1. Microsoft Bot Framework
Microsoft Bot Framework provides components like Bot Builder SDK, Developer Portal, Bot Directory etc. to develop scenario based AI Chatbots for Commerce Chatbot, Information Chatbot, and Enterprise Chatbot.
2. Wit.ai (Facebook Bot Engine)
Wit.ai can extract user intent and turn it into actions, something like – “Post the last 3 pictures I took on Facebook”
intent = share
order_by = created_at DESC
limit = 3
media = picture
social_media = Facebook
It defines and extracts own entities as well as it has predefined entities like time, date etc.
3. Dialogflow (api.ai)
Dialogflow is the new name for previously called api.ai. Dialogflow runs on Google’s platform and is powered by Google’s machine learning expertise. Dialogflow has Enterprise edition as well as a Free Standard version available with limited Knowledge Connectors etc.
Using a bot development platform is the easier way for creating artificial intelligence chatterbot without worrying about the coding part.
Below are some of the commonly used chatbot platform for development.
Hope this gives you a basic understanding on what is an ai chatbot, its importance and how it works etc.
Can you now recollect any of the ai chatbot that you have used or come across, let me know in the comments section below.
