Chatbot technology has been around since the sixties, though its rising demand is more of a recent phenomenon. From Siri to Alexa and Cortana to Meena, the success of all these chatbots must have also made you wonder how to make a chatbot app. Now, if you know the right steps, making a profitable, purpose-driven chatbot isn’t too difficult. In fact, Topflightapps already has this really detailed article on how to make a chatbot. And here’s an abbreviated version of the same to get you started.
Contents
How to make a chatbot app by identifying the purpose
Start with outlining the reason why you’re making a chatbot. Do you want to make your own chatbot that learns from user inputs, or have a rule-based one with preset answers? If you are making a chatbot for customer support, you want to make something that can get answers to all questions. If it’s for sales purposes, the bot’s aim would be consultation and data gathering.
Choose a channel to host your chatbot
Your chatbot has to be available on the platform that your prospects are the most comfortable with. Is it going to be on your standalone mobile application, on your website, or on Facebook Messenger? It all depends on the preference of your target customers. Of course, there is always the option to use the same bot for multiple platforms.
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Select a technology stack to go with
In terms of the technology stack, you can choose a framework and let bot makers develop a chatbot from scratch. Or, you can use a DIY bot-making platform and do it yourself. While picking a framework, the choice is driven by the skills of the developer and the availability of third-party and open-source libraries for natural language processing.
Start designing the conversation
Designing the flow of conversation in a DIY platform is simply about dragging-and-dropping reply options. But you need to hire professional bot developers if you have chosen a framework. They’ll handle the server-side and front of your chatbot. There isn’t much you can do about the graphical UI while using a chatbot platform.
Training your chatbot for the job
Now that you are almost done with how to create a chatbot, it is time to start training it. If your chatbot uses AI, you’ll have to train it on huge data sets because you would want the bot to capture user intent. It is only possible when your bot knows all the variants of customer questions. You can test your chatbot on existing datasets or use third-party datasets as per your needs.
Testing out the chatbot
Now, it’s the time to test out whether the cost to build a chatbot application was truly worth it. Keep in mind that chatbots are a novelty, so several customers might try and break it. You need to be prepared for such scenarios beforehand. So, train your chatbot with polite general replies, and the feature to seamlessly fallback to a human agent when required.
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Deploying and maintaining the bot
Make sure that all the endpoints remain connected when you are deploying your chatbot. If you use an ERP, CRM, or such software systems, ensure that the chatbot gets integrated with the entire infrastructure. After the chatbot is successfully deployed, keep a regular check on it to refine its answers, and see to it that it’s doing the job as per your expectations.
Ending note
And that’s all you need to know about how to make a chatbot app! Seems pretty simple, right? Well, it actually is! So, go ahead and try your hand at creating a chatbot for your venture.
