Introduction To Chatbots

Chatbots have been a trending topic for quite some time now and have got a lot of people excited about them. Some believe that bots are the next big thing and will soon replace apps, while others think they are just a fad, bound to fail.

In this article we will restrain ourselves from giving opinion on the future of chatbots. Instead, we will try to shine some light on how they work, what they can be used for, and how to get one up and running.

If you remember CleverBot, you know that the concept of chatbots isn't that new. What makes them so relevant right now is:

1. The huge amount of time people spend texting in their messaging apps (Facebook Messenger, Slack, etc.), making messengers a fast-growing market where businesses can engage potential customers.
2. The advancements in artificial intelligence, machine learning and natural language processing, allowing bots to converse more and more like real people.

Modern chatbots do not rely solely on text, and will often show useful cards, images, links, and forms, providing an app-like experience

This allows them to be used for many different purposes such as shopping, customer service, news, games, and anything else you can think of. A good chatbot doesn't have to perform a huge variety of tasks - a bot that shows you the latest news doesn't need to be able to order Chinese food. It does one thing and does it well.

How Do Chatbots Work?

Most people won't build their chatbots from scratch as there are plenty frameworks and services that can help. However, in order to grasp how bots work, we have to go over some developer talk.

Backend: Chatbots can be built in basically any programming language that allows you to make a web API. For most people this will be either Node.js or PHP, but there are many bot libraries written for Java and Python as well. The backend receives messages, thinks of a response, and returns it to the user.

Frontend: This can be one of the popular messengers apps (Facebook Messenger, Slack, Telegram), or a simple chat interface like the Realtime Chat With Node.js we built some time ago. You are not limited to a single platform - the same bot can be implemented in more than one place.

Connecting the two: Your web server will then have to setup webhooks - URL-based connections between your bot and the chat platform. Webhooks will allow you to securely send and receive messages via simple HTTP requests. All of the mainstream messengers provide detailed guides on how to connect your bot to them.

Getting Started With Chatbots

If we've managed to pump you up and you want to start building your first chatbot, here are some tips that will get you going. Depending on how much of the work you want to do on your own, you can go full DYI and build your bot from scratch, or you can just use a framework that will save you lots of time.

• BotKit - The most popular toolkit for building bots. Its open-source and very well documented.
• Claudia - Chatbot builder designed for deploying directly to AWS Lambda.
• Bottr - Super simple Node.js framework with built in app for testing. Awesome if you just want to play around for 10 minutes.

Once you've completed your bot, most of these frameworks allow you to easily connect it to the popular messaging platforms, which is a huge timesaver as all the major platforms have different setup processes.

If you want to skip the development process as a whole, you can trust one of the many available bot-building services:

• wit.ai - Service that receives raw text or voice data and uses NLP to help you manage responses.
• Chatfuel - A tool for Facebook Messenger or Telegram bots. No programming involved.
• motion.ai - Full bot building service with support for many texting platforms.
• api.ai - Natural language processing that allows you to make bots and define conversation scenarios.

Conclusion

The idea of chatbots has got developers, businesses and messenger apps all working together, building a totally new ecosystem. We will have to wait and see how well bots will be adopted by the general public, but whether they fail or become the next big thing, we will have some fun playing with AI in the meantime.