Chatbots and AI

What are chatbots and how do they work?

Many chatbots use a rules-based approach. When the bot receives a message from a customer, the bot scans the message for keywords or phrases. If the bot detects these keywords, it applies rules that the programmer has predefined and then responds with a corresponding answer. For example, when a customer sends a message reading "nearby restaurants", a bot might be programmed to send a list of restaurants. More complex examples, but always linked to rules, require the bot to ask a series of closed-ended questions and make decisions based on a classic decision tree.

Some chatbots also have more complex features that include understanding natural language (the bot understands the intent of a message and not just keywords) or managing a status and machine learning module to use questions/user responses in order to improve its performance over time.

Why are chatbots important to your business now?

One of the reasons why ELbuild is watching chatbots with growing interest is the increased penetration of messaging apps. Apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and WeChat are enjoying an increasing number of users. As a result, many brands have started interacting with customers through tools they already use. Chatbots provide brands with efficient and innovative ways to interact with customers on these platforms through APIs and libraries available for the main languages.

Other increasingly popular devices are home speakers that allow users to use their voices to access information and carry out activities. Smartphones are ubiquitous, and voice-activated home speakers are growing rapidly: over 10 million Amazon Echo devices have been sold in the US.

Lastly, we've seen enormous progress and an impressive expansion of machine learning and artificial intelligence in recent years. Computer scientists have made great strides in the field of natural language processing. For example, speech recognition technology has now reached human parity. Every major tech company (Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, IBM) has launched bots and/or new frameworks and platforms for building bots, making the market very attractive for service providers.

Which technologies do we use and integrate to develop chatbots?

If you have recently rented a car from some of the most important brands and asked for an insurance quote, you will have received messages and interacted with a Whatsapp Business bot. This is just one of the examples of tools you can use to increase conversions and boost customer satisfaction. At a development level, it's a question of using server-side languages that invoke the APIs exposed through a messaging service to start a conversation in correspondence with events on your CRM, e-commerce , or website. By exposing one or more webhooks, the software receives the user's responses and can process them, requesting input or providing information. At ELbuild, we're able to create and integrate solutions of this type in any web CRM, also through our use of microservices architecture.Contact us to discuss your options without any obligation.