Chat bots as a your Helper

Overview

What If you wanted to buy Nike shoes from Amazon online, you would go to their website, look around until you find the shoes you wanted, and then you would purchase them or you may not purchase at all, you decide to exit.

If these online companies provide a bot(imagine a perpetual Salesman ) say on their FB messenger or their Android/IOS Apps and you start chatting with it in your Natural Language ,It would ask you what you’re looking for and you would simply… tell it.

This is one such use case.There are many things that can be done with chat bots

1. Farmer Bot : Farmer chats on FB in his natural language and he gets his answers for his issues like type of crops he /she can grow ,type of manure
2. Maintenance Bot:All the maintenance issues that a company has seen over the years could be placed in a single place , any issues a employee faces he can login and chat with the bot and bot can figure out the troubleshooting tips and respond back to the user.

Bots can be built using the Machine learning OR based on Rules .

Rules based ones:

• This bot is very limited. It can only respond to very specific commands. If you say the wrong thing, it doesn’t know what you mean.
• This bot depends on programmer and analysts

Machine Learning:

• These bots would work based on Machine learning and Natural Language Processing
• This can be self learning and become smarter with every interactions.

Don’t I need to be an expert at artificial intelligence to be able to build something that has artificial intelligence?

The answer is NO , you do not have to be an expert.There are various AI services with which you can hookup to .Following is the list

• Octane AI (I am co-founder and CEO)
• wit.ai (bought by Facebook)
• howdy’s botkit (raised $1.5+ mil in funding)
• api.ai (raised $8.6+ mil in funding)
• textit.in
• Motion.ai
• Chatfuel
• IBM’s Watson
• BeepBoopHQ
• Dexter (owned by Betaworks)
• converse.ai
• Gupshup

Steps to build a AI chatbot

1. Figure out what you want to do ? the use cases that is important
2. Choose a messaging platform , say FB ,Slack ,Discord,Kik etc
3. If you want AI flavor choose from above AI list
4. Bring up your Web-server that is available on internet

 Basic Architecture of Chatbots 

Resources

• The Secret To Building Your Own Facebook Chat Bot In Less Than 15 Minutes by Jerry Wang
• Go Library for Facebook Messenger Bots by Harrison Shoebridge
• How To Build Bots For Facebook Messenger by Facebook
• Building Your Messenger Bot [Video] by Facebook
• Creating a Bot by Rob Ellis
• Botwiki
• Telegram Bot API — PHP SDK by Syed Irfaq
• A Beginner’s Guide To Your First (Slack) Bot by Slack
• Slackbot Tutorial by Michi Kono
• Create A Slackbot Using Botkit by Altitude Labs
• Sketch UI Kit For Messenger Bots by Mockuuups
• How to create your own Telegram bot who answer its users, without coding by Chatfuel
• Chatbots.org

Thanks