Technology & Business
What You Should Know Before Creating Your Own Chatbot
This is how to get started with software bots and AI digital assistants
“Gabe status: bare feet on table. K t-shirt, a day late. I hate him.” Dinesch wrote in his chat box describing a coworker who was few meters away from him in the open workspace.
“Leave me alone. I hate you.” Gilfoyle texted back. “I hate you more :) I’m going to kill him,” Dinesch tipped, then pressed ENTER. “Murder/suicide?” Gilfoyle asked.
Laughing at what Gilfoyle said, Dinesch looked aside and noticed that Gilfoyle was in the small kitchen in the corner looking for a snack and not even holding his smartphone in his hands. For a brief moment, he couldn’t understand what he had just seen. He turned back to his screen and tipped: “Gilfoyle?”
“What??” Gilfoyle replied. “Who is this?” Dinesch wrote, gazing at the same time at Gilfoyle, who was still in the kitchen.
“Your mom,” Gilfoyle answered.
Confused, Dinesch left his desk and rushed to the kitchen: “Gilfoyle? What’s going on? I just texted you, and you were… um… We’ve been texting back and forth all day. Was that not you?”
“Complicated question,” Gilfoyle said. “Is your shadow you?”
“Was that a bot?” Dinesch shouted. “Yes,” Gilfoyle replied quietly.
“So I spent all day chatting with a bot? You made an ‘AI Gilfoyle’ and I was talking to it?” Dinesch yelled with signs of irritation on his face.
“Yes, do you need the real me for this conversation?” Gilfoyle said.
While this was just a scene from the “Silicon Valley”, it’s not far away from the reality of artificial intelligence integration in modern digital processes.
Today, AI bots are an inherent part of the IT landscape and the interaction with software via natural language is becoming increasingly popular. If you’re curious about how to create your own chatbot, you’ll find out below some insights.
Table of Contents∘ 5 Examples of Powerful ChatBots
∘ Julie
∘ H&M digital shopping assistant
∘ ChatBots for seniors and patients with Alzheimer
∘ Zootopia
∘ MedWhat
∘ 6 Principles for Successful ChatBots Design
∘ Identity
∘ Relevant answers
∘ Proactively manage customer expectations
∘ Humor and Empathy
∘ Fallback responses and exit processes
∘ Continuous monitoring and improvement
∘ Chatbots and Privacy
∘ How Do You Get Your Own Chatbot?
∘ Final Thought5 Examples of Powerful ChatBots
Although they are not employees in a call center or humans from help desk, the following virtual communication robots have achieved to convince the users of the quality of their answers and service:
Julie
Julie is an award-winning virtual assistant from the American railway company Amtrak. It answers more than a million customer inquiries per year.
H&M digital shopping assistant
The digital shopping assistant from the Swedish fashion company H&M gives individualized product recommendations and supports sales.
ChatBots for senior people and patients with Alzheimer’s disease
Nduranc has developed chatbots for the medical field to combat Alzheimer’s and dementia. They enable training conversations with sick people and medical analysis of language development if the data is collected in the cloud.
Zootopia
Disney lets fans of the animated film Zootopia solve crimes by using chatbots on Facebook Messenger. This chatbot represents the cartoon character Judy Hopps.
MedWhat
MedWhat is a virtual assistant that answers medical and health questions for consumers and doctors instantly. In Corona times, patients and medical professionals have used the MedWhat bot to obtain remote diagnoses.
It’s a learning system that, thanks to sophisticated machine learning algorithms, makes great progress in terms of the accuracy of the results. The bot is also constantly fed with medical research results and scientific work so that it has a considerable wealth of medical expertise.
6 Principles for Successful ChatBots Design
A chatbot can fall short and frustrate users if they use highly standardized dialogues, they have a lack of personalization, or give wrong and inappropriate answers.
Stephan Diederich, an IT consultant and researcher from the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, recommends considering six basic principles when designing a chatbot:
- Create an appealing artificial identity: using a human name and an avatar makes the bot appear personal and approachable to users.
- Ensure relevant, adequate, and variable answers: The quality of the conversation increases the acceptance of the chatbot by customers.
- Proactively manage users' expectations.
- Use design options from traditional customer interaction — such as humor and empathy: empathic responses can improve the perception of the chatbot by frustrated users and occasional entertaining statements make the conversation more appealing.
- Consider fallback responses and exit processes: the bot should be equipped with appropriate fallback responses. These can, for example, forward the customer to a human account manager or refer to other contact options. The exit process from the interaction with the chatbot should be designed as friendly as possible.
- Continuous monitoring and improvement: the issues that could not be processed by the bot can be implemented if necessary after a systematic cost/benefit analysis and thus incrementally expand the functionality of the chatbot. Many chatbots platforms offer a variety of analysis options, such as evaluations for the use of fallback responses, which can provide information about the existing limitations of the bot.
ChatBots and Privacy
To provide more appropriate and personalized answers, chatbots should learn from user input.
Before collecting and evaluating the user data, which reflects their interests and their behavior, you should inform them about this profiling and ask them if they agree to it.
How Do You Get Your Own Chatbot?
There are a bunch of platforms in the market for building voice- and text-bots and advanced virtual assistants. Facebook, for example, enables developers to create chatbots that communicate with customers within Facebook Messenger.
You can use also the Azure Bot Service to program self-learning applications and bots that communicate with users in a personalized way. There are other providers and solutions for your own bot like the following ones:
Final Thought
Chatbots can be used in a wide variety of ways. The degree of how much you can benefit from them depends on the type of business and the costs of implementation and operation.
If you have to give a quick first reaction to customers’ inquiries or have a business process such as booking or online shopping where users need purchase advice, AI bots can represent a useful addition and innovatively complement the traditional channels such as websites or self-service portals.
Make sure you build a learning system that interacts with people flexibly and naturally.
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