Today we will discuss the Chatbot development process and how chatbots can be applied. Do you want to know how much it costs to build a chat bot and how to do it from scratch? Read this article until the end to reveal the answers.
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What is a Chatbot app?
Chatbot is a software that imitates interactive human conversation by using inbuilt voice commands or text chats.
How do Chatbots work?
Chatbots adopt Natural Language Processing that allows them to process and analyze large amounts of natural language data. Some chatbots are equipped with remarkable human-like characteristics and can provide a great conversational experience.
In fact, one particular chatbot type is better at achieving this. Read further to learn about machine learning chatbots, you won’t believe how smart they can be.
Chatbot Features
#1 Human-like Approach
Some AI bots are designed to imitate human conversations and jokes. Moreover in our projects when developing a chatbot we usually integrate our customers business brand’s identity into chatbot design.
#2 Rich Functionality Chats
They’re meant to have intuitive menus and provide users with clickable elements, media sharing features.
#3 Extended Support
Our experts are sure chatbot’s initial objective is to be available 24/7 and improve the daily routine.
#4 Predictive
AI powered chatbots can determine a series of appropriate responses and ensure user’s involvement to the greatest extent possible. Can you believe that chatbots are able to produce texts that are sprinkled with humor or blunt with metaphors?
#5 Simple Purchase Process
Chatbots let customers make an order right from the messenger.
Types of Chatbots
Rule-based Chatbots
Rule-based Chatbots can handle a list of simple queries and answer them in a form of pre-built responses.
Machine Learning-based
AI chatbots handle complex questions and are able to analyze the collected data and provide better feedback.
How to build a Chatbot by yourself and How much does it cost?
You would need a self-service platform. They provide access to tools needed for building a bot by yourself.
- IBM Watson is an open multi-cloud platform, both developers and non-coders can build a powerful chatbot application from scratch or use pre-built applications and tools.
- Another platform is Google Dialogflow, it offers an end-to-end development package for a seamless chatbot creation.
- Last but not least is the Azure bot service platform which provides a set of tools for bot development, testing and deployment processes all rolled in one.
Though these platforms are a much simpler choice, you might still need developers’ help to figure out how these platforms work.
Developing a Chatbot from Scratch
You will definitely need a team of developers. Here at EZtek we use either Java or Python programming languages to build chatbots. You also need to make sure that your future development team is able to integrate NLP to your bot. There are many existing NLP engines such as Open NLP and NLTK.
What about the cost of making a Chatbot?
Based on our experience, there are several aspects that mostly influence price.
- Integration with chat: what matters is the type of bot and its technical complexity.
- Communication interface specification: here we build command line user interface CLI and natural language user interface.
- Adaption of the business logic.
Now we can assume the total estimated cost of the project. The minimum price for custom chatbot development starts at 6000$. On the contrary, the price for a very sophisticated AI chat bot used to handle customer support ranges a lot and can be very expensive.
We hope this article helped you to figure out how chatbot development works. This article was prepared by the EZtek team. We provide software development, IT consulting, UI/UX design and software testing services.
