What is Chatbot?

Chatbot is an assistant that communicates with individuals through text messages or voice commands, it is a virtual companion that is integrated into websites, applications or instant messengers and helps businesses to get closer to customers by answering their queries like a real person.

Wouldn’t it be great if someone could ease your pain by making your work easier and less hectic every day??? Yes, Chatbots can do that right for you!!!

How it works?

Simply explained in this video…

Types of Chatbot

We can differentiate two main types of Chatbots:

• Simple – This is the simplest type of Chatbot also called scripted. Conversations with this type can only take place in pre-defined structured ways and directions. In other words, you’ll get a pre-programmed response to each question you ask. The Chatbot cannot deviate from this in any way. Their sole purpose is automation, like booking a flight or making a purchase. Simple Chatbots appear in messaging apps such as Messenger or Skype.
• Intelligent – Using artificial intelligence allows the Chatbot to provide more flexible responses to the user’s questions. This type of Chatbot learns from each conversation and uses these experiences to answer future questions more accurately. However, artificial intelligence also has limitations: a Chatbot built with AI technology still cannot understand more complex contexts or lead the conversation – it only gives answers.

Is Chatbot different from Virtual Assistant?

Yes, Chatbots and Virtual Assistants are both different!!!

1. Intelligence

Chatbots: Chatbots are typically text-based and are programmed to reply to only a certain set of questions or statements. If the question asked varies from the learned set of responses by the customer, they will unable to process and fail. Also Chatbots cannot hold long, continuing human interaction. They provide more like an FAQ type of an interaction. They cannot process languages particularly.

Virtual Assistants: On the other hand, Virtual Assistants have a much-sophisticated interactive platform. They understand not just the language but also the meaning of what the user is saying and interpret easily. They can learn from instances and provide an unpredictability to their behaviour. That way they can have a long human interaction which Chatbots fail to. Also, Virtual assistants can perform slight complex tasks as compared to Chatbots.

2.Natural Language Processing

Chatbots: Chatbots are Pre-programmed and does not respond to a change in use of language. It does not have high language processing skills. It only picks certain words from the user and answers it with a response programmed into it. Which means it is specifically programmed to answer specific replies to specific questions and it cannot reply to complex questions that are not programmed in it. In such a situation, it cannot understand the customer and fails to reply appropriately.

Virtual Assistants: Virtual Assistants mainly concentrate on natural language processing (NLP) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU). There has been a substantial amount of research in NLP to build advanced capabilities in virtual assistants; case in point Virtual Assistants can also understand slangs used in everyday natural conversations and analyse the sentiments by the use of languages, to enhance an even better set of communication skills. Which In-fact makes virtual assistants more conversational than the Chatbots.

3.Tasks

Chatbots: Chatbot has a limited use and does not have sophisticated algorithms. It follows tasks based on simple rules and cannot perform complex tasks as compared to Virtual Assistants. eBay Chatbot is the most advanced e-commerce Chatbot.

Virtual Assistants: Virtual Assistants have a wider scope compared to Chatbots and can perform a range of tasks, for example comparing products or finding the best product based on the given features. It is also deployed to tasks like decision making and widely used in e-commerce. It can perform activities like sharing jokes, playing music, stock market updates and even controlling the electronic gadgets in the room. Best example for this would be Alexa.

4. Technology

Chatbots: Two Chatbot models predominantly used are generative model and the selective model. The generator ranking model has a lot of layers of information and what is asked by the user goes through each layer to finally come up with the best response. The selective model, popularly called as the ranking model, ranks the information by the user with its current memory information and goes into a sequence to come up with the best response. Bots are trained with structured data. Chatbots can easily be made with languages Node.js, JavaScript and python. Although java and C# can also be used, but they don’t provide an interface as better as the other three. Some hosting servers popular with building them are AWS, Heroku and Azure.

Virtual Assistants: Virtual assistants use artificial neural networks to learn from situations. ANNs are used to recognize, classify and predict, based on analysis. With the help of several APIs, the virtual assistant can’t be made to learn. Some popular APIs available are Api.ai, Wit.ai, Melissa, Amazon AI, IBM Watson.

How Chatbots help your business?

Let’s find out the importance of adopting Chatbot in your business and how Chatbots can help you win more customers and retain the existing ones.

• Enhanced Customer Assistance

Humans are capable of handling only few concerns at a time but with Chatbots, the company will be capable of operating without any upper limit. This will not only boost the productivity of business operations but also enable human agents to focus on other important tasks. AI Chatbots will scale up the operations saving efforts and costs enormously.

• More Satisfied Customers

Using Chatbots, friendly conversations can be initiated engaging the customers and providing them better satisfaction with quick & relevant responses. Well optimized Bots can instantly understand the queries & deliver the best possible response instantly leaving customers satisfied.

• Human-like Interaction

Using technologies such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods, bots can help to understand customer queries and respond to them just like humans.

• Available 24/7

Chatbots are available 24/7 and do not get tired like humans, so they can process client requests day and night all year round without delays or pauses. 

• Applicable in many industries

Chatbots are used in many industries like

• E-commerce
• Banking & Financial Service
• HR & Recruitment

Conclusion

AI Chatbots are becoming the next move for every business and implementing Chatbots is a smart choice for organizations that wants to grow and boost customer engagement. With human interaction like nature of Chatbots, brands like Pizza hut, Sephora have exploited the nature of Chatbots and grown significantly.

Our team of eCommerce technology experts can help you make the right decisions for Chatbot implementation to your business .Get in touch with the experts!