CHATBOT AGENCY BLOG

Here you can discover everything about conversational UI and chatbots: best practices, ideas and AI related news brought to you by the Bot Forge team!

Google Launches New Dialogflow CX in Beta

Dialogflow, Technology

Google has beta launched a new version of it’s Dialogflow natural language understanding (NLU) platform: Dialogflow CX. The Dialogflow version we all know and love is now called Dialogflow ES.

The new Dialogflow Customer Experience (CX) platform is aimed at building advanced artificial intelligence agents for enterprise-level projects at a larger and more complex scale than the standard variety.

“Dialogflow CX provides a new way of designing agents, taking a state machine approach to agent design,” Google explained in the documentation for CX. “This gives you clear and explicit control over a conversation, a better end-user experience, and a better development workflow.”

Stand Out Features

The stand out feature for us is the that the Interactive flow visualizations allow conversation builders to quickly see, understand, and edit their work so creating more complex multi turn transactional conversational experiences will be more straightforward.

A state-based data model allows developers to reuse intents, intuitively define transitions, and handle supplemental questions.

In a single virtual agent, separate flows let multiple teams work simultaneously.

Plus, there seems to be versioning and environment at the flow level with other features such as the ability to run AB experiments and split traffic.

We’ve started to look at the new Dialogflow CX console and things look really interesting.

A full break-down is beyond the scope of this post; we will be getting back to you with a more detailed feature analysis in future.

You can read more about Dialogflow CX here

Introductory Video can be see here

Beta Limitations

Its worth keep in mind Dialogflow CX is in beta, so some important features are not implemented yet. The following features found in Dialogflow ES are not implemented for Dialogflow CX yet:

Any language other than English (en)
Integrations
Knowledge connectors
System entity extension
History
Training data import

First Impressions

Our first impressions are that this will be a major tool for creating complex conversational enquiry heavy chatbots without having to juggle context. So particularly IVR chatbots or text chatbots which need to serve more complex roles.

It’s also important to mention that this is a beta release, so some important features are not implemented yet. The following features found in Dialogflow ES are not implemented for Dialogflow CX:

As Google technology partners we are really excited about this new version of Dialogflow; if you want to learn more about Dialogflow CX and how an advanced chatbot can help your company please contact us to discuss further.

September 2, 2020/0 Comments/by ajwthompson

Google Cloud launches new AI chatbot for COVID-19 information

Dialogflow, Technology

The Rapid Response Virtual Agent program includes open source templates for companies to add coronavirus content to their own chatbots.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are continuing to take a front-row seat in fighting COVID-19, with Google Cloud launching an AI chatbot on Wednesday. The chatbot, which it calls the Rapid Response Virtual Agent program, will provide information to battle the COVID-19 pandemic, as announced in a Google blog.

The program will Google Cloud customers to respond more quickly to questions from their own customers about the coronavirus. It’s designed for organizations who need to be able to provide information related to the COVID-19 pandemic to their customers, such as government agencies, healthcare and public health organizations, as well as travel, financial services and retail industries.

Google also offers Contact Center AI for 24/7 self-service support on COVID-19 questions via a chatbot or over the phone. Google also allows for businesses to add COVID-19 content to their own virtual agents with the ability to integrate open-source templates from organizations that have already launched similar initiatives. For instance, Verily partnered with Google Cloud to launch the Pathfinder virtual agent template for health systems and hospitals. It enables customers to create chat or voice bots that answer questions about COVID-19 symptoms and provide guidance from public health authorities such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and World Health Organization (WHO), according to the Google blog.

The Contact Center AI’s Rapid Response Virtual Agent program is available in any of the 23 languages supported by Dialogflow.

Google has provided a template to rapidly create a Dialogflow agent: You can find the template here. There is also documentation on how to build and deploy a virtual agent, whether voice or chat.

We’ve been looking in more detail at this template and created our own chatbot. This is a work in progress and will be something which we are updating and improving daily. You can interact with this chatbot in the bottom right of this page.

April 10, 2020/0 Comments/by ajwthompson

How Much Does It Cost To Build A Chatbot In 2020?

Artificial Intelligence, Chatbots, Conversational UI, Facebook Messenger

We are often asked this question by clients looking to start their first chatbot project. Like most software projects the price really depends on the scale and complexity of the project. This will govern the effort involved in building a chatbot.

So, let’s take a look at the key drivers impacting the price for custom chatbot development.

Channel

The first one is the channel in which the bot should function. By this, I mean where the bot will be used. It could be as a website widget implemented as a popup interface or webpage (You can learn more about webpage chatbots here) or deployed into existing messaging platforms. Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp (read more about WhatsApp chatbots here), Microsoft Teams, Slack, Telegram, Viber are just a few examples with some providing more complex UI elements which can be utilised in your bot. Other obvious channels to deploy a chatbot are voice; Google Assistant, Alexa or even IVR systems can often use the same conversational engine as your text-based chatbots.

For our custom chatbot integrations, we normally provide one channel with the project and then charge per extra channels as required. We’ve found that our clients will often want a web-based chatbot first and role out the chatbot onto different channels. It really does depend on the type of project. Extra channel costs can be in the region of £1000-2500.

There are a number of really good chatbot building platforms for creating simple UI chatbot interfaces such as Botstar, Chatfuel and Manychat; these offer some free templates and the ability to create chatbots which can be deployed to specific channels, for example, Facebook Messenger (our Carly chatbot is a great example of a Chatfuel bot). These Bot building platforms offer some good features: Visual Flow Editors, APIs & Webhook Integrations, Templates, Broadcasting etc. However, in our experience, we have found that even with free templates there is always some costs due to setup and minor customisation to attain the maximum chatbot behaviour. Our minimum price is around £1500 with some monthly costs for hosting and chatbot management and training.

Features

Depending on which channel the bot will work in there is also scope to provide other functionality such as voice capability for web chatbots or enhanced chatbot interface features. Again costs depend on the amount of complexity and effort involved in building each feature. As an example adding voice interaction capability to a Web chatbot would be £1000. Human-agent handover or WhatsApp integration is also a popular feature.

Natural Language Ability

If a chatbot is required to support more complex natural language processing(NLP- you can read more about some of the tech terms here) features and not just UI elements such as buttons then this will mean that additional effort is needed to train the bot and design and implement a more complex conversational flow. These sort of bots start at around £2500. We utilise the best of breed cloud NLP solutions for these types of projects. In particular, we use Google Dialogflow as we are Google Tech partners and experts in Dialogflow.

Conversation skills

The complexity, scope and volume of the required conversational ability effects cost. This relates to specifics such as:

The number of branches in the conversation tree.
Quantity of questions that have to be handled by the chatbot which can often be in the 1000s.
The numbers of training phrases needed; this can improve the accuracy of the chatbot, (you can read more about training data here)
The complexity of conversational ability ie. support for complex user enquires.

So chatbots which combine richer elements with complex conversational ability can be in the region of £2500 – £5000

Languages

Chatbots are capable of supporting different languages, as long as these are supported by the NLP engine it’s possible to add different language permutations fairly easily. However, each language will need its own testing so costs can be in the region of £1500-3500 for each language depending on the size and complexity of the conversational ability.

Integration

Connect to existing systems, APIs, RPA, and knowledge bases

The other area which will impact cost is dependent on the planned role of the chatbot: what the chatbot will need to do carry out its role? Will the chatbot need to integrate with current systems to provide its responses? Will it need to hand over to live agents? Connect with CRM and ticketing solutions? Some chatbots may need to carry out complex interactions to provide answers to customer queries. Chatbots can leverage other AI systems to provide relevant information to govern conversational flow. For example, sentiment analysis.

With so many possibilities for chat bot features It’s hard to estimate the price here, but as a rule, these types of chatbots cost from £4000. For each integration, we would suggest a cost of £1000-2500 it really depends on the amount of development effort required for each one.

Deployment

Security

Often security demands for a chatbot project need specific features, for example, Hippa compliance. In these cases SSO, RBAC, and on-prem or private cloud deployment can be used to ensure compliance with company security policies. These can have an impact on overall project costs and again, costs are based on the demands of a specific project.

Maintenance

We offer our chatbot solutions based on a SAAS model. Costs incurred tend to be based on a yearly subscription and again depend a lot on the scale and complexity of the chatbot. These monthly costs will cover some of the following:

Daily supervised learning and improvements.
Monitoring conversations and confirming qualified intents as well as checking for unmatched intents and fixing them as needed.
Post-development support.
Third-party and integration maintenance. Making sure your bot is performing well and healthy!
NLP costs(if applicable).
Hosting and data storage.
Chatbot reporting interface.

As a rule, maintenance subscription costs tend to be in the region of 10-15% of initial implementation costs per month.

Flexibility

As you can see, the cost of a chatbot project can vary widely depending on the features required. Each chatbot project is different.

It’s worth keeping in mind that the cost of a capable chatbot does not have to be prohibitive and it’s often a good idea to start small and add features as business needs require them.

At The Bot Forge, whatever the cost we propose for your chatbot project our aim is to create value for your business and hopefully form a long-lasting relationship.

The Bot Forge are always available to discuss further improvements and functionality to add to your chatbot or just to talk to us about your next great idea.

February 10, 2020/0 Comments/by ajwthompson

Dialogflow Mega Agent

Dialogflow, Technology

A Mega Agent..so what?!

Ok so you could argue that I need to get out more…but I was excited to notice yesterday that there is a new feature which has sneaked into the Dialogflow console. This is the concept of a Mega Agent. It’s the ability to set an agent type to mega agent so that you can combine multiple agents into one single agent.

So why is this so important? At The Bot Forge, some of our Dialogflow agents can have 1000’s of intents, particularly if they are providing an information service for a knowledge base. Unfortunately, the knowledge base functionality can be limiting as looked at in my post: Dialogflow Knowledge Connectors so it’s often necessary to create one intent per FAQ to get the required accuracy and control. This can quickly use up an agents 2000 intent limit.

We have recently had to look at creating our own version of a mega agent. This was to be used in a website chatbot implementation which would serve as a gatekeeper to initial enquiries so that we could hand over a conversation to a specific chatbot overseeing a specific knowledge domain. So not really ideal and involving more middleware complexity particularly as we were planning to handle some sort of context between all the agents.

There are some caveats, its still one GCP project and there is a maximum of 10 sub-agents per mega agent.

A Quick look at Mega Agents

It’s also important to remember this feature is in beta! You can read more about setting up the new Mega Agent here. At the time of writing the link on the add agent page is incorrect.
I took a really quick look at the new mega agent functionality.

Adding a mega agent

Adding a Mega Agent is pretty straightforward, when you add a new agent then you just select the switch:

Your mega agents are then listed in the agent list:

Adding a sub-agent

Once the agent is selected then a Sub Agent button is enabled:

After selecting the sub-agents button I had already created a test agent to use as my sub-agent so I connected it.

When choosing adding sub-agents you can select an environment or whether to include or exclude the knowledge Base. There is also a handy link to the sub-agent:

My test agent was a simple default agent with one added intent:
Does_mega_agent_work with one training phrase “does mega agent work”

Testing it out

So far so good. Just to recap I have created a mega agent and another agent to act as my sub. So now for a test drive of my Mega Agent in the Dialogflow simulator

Unfortunately, I didn’t get the result I hoped for:

This was obviously an IAM permissions issue so I figured probably something which I had not done. I went back to the information page and re-read the section: Set up roles

Basically, to interact with a mega agent in the Dialogflow simulator, the service account that is linked to your mega agent in the Dialogflow Console needs a role with detect intent access for all sub-agents. To achieve this I went to the IAM permissions page for the sub-agent and added the mega agent’s service account email address as a member of the project with a role of Dialogflow API Client.

Going back to the simulator and trying out does mega agent again resulted in the correct response from the sub-agent!

Where to go from here with mega agents.

For me, this is a major step for chatbots which have big numbers of intents > 2000. Or where different teams need to manage a particular knowledge area for one chatbot subject, use-case or topic area.

This post has really only taken a quick view of the new Dialogflow mega agent functionality. In a later post, I want to investigate leveraging contexts between agents and use a more complex example.

There are still some areas which need work though. The biggest one which springs to mind is that the training pages area of the console for a mega agent needs to be able to support the concept of sub-agents to assign sub intents. It’s still just a beta feature so hopefully, more to come!

February 1, 2020/0 Comments/by ajwthompson

Training a chatbot

Chatbots, Conversational UI

Training data for chatbots.

I’m going to look at the challenges in creating a chatbot which can answer questions about its specific domain effectively. In particular, I’m going to look at the challenges and possible solutions in creating a chatbot with a reasonable conversational ability at their initial implementation. Every chatbot project is different but often clients come to us with a large knowledge base which they want a chatbot to support from its release but with very little training data.

We are going to concentrate on a Dialogflow project to look at some examples however the challenges and solution are similar for all the most well know NLP engines, Watson, Rasa, Luis etc.

The Challenge

One of the key problems with modern chatbot generation is that they need large amounts of chatbot training data.
If you want your chatbot to understand a specific intention, you need to provide it with a large number of phrases that convey that intention. In a Dialogflow agent, these training phrases are called utterances and Dialogflow stipulate at least 10 training phrases to each intent.

Depending on the field of application for the chatbot, thousands of inquiries in a specific subject area can be required to make it ready for use with each one of these lines of enquiry needing multiple training phrases.

The training process of an ai powered chatbot means that chatbots learn from each new inquiry. The more requests a chatbot has processed, the better trained it is. The NLU(Natural Language Understanding) is continually improved, and the bot’s detection patterns are refined. Unfortunately, a large number of additional queries are necessary to optimize the bot, working towards the goal of reaching a recognition rate approaching 90-100% often means a long bedding in process of several months.

Data Scarcity

One of the main issues in today’s chatbots generation is that large amounts of training information are required to match the challenges described previously. You have to give it a large number of phrases that convey your purpose if you want your chatbot to understand a specific intention.

To date, these large training corpus had to be manually generated. This can be a time-consuming job with an associated increase in the cost of the project. One of the main issues we have faced is that often clients want to see quick results in a chatbot implementation. These types of chatbot projects are often use cases which are providing information regarding a wide-ranging domain and may not necessarily have a lot of chat transcripts or emails to work with to create the initial training model. In these cases there is often not enough training data and so it takes time to get decent and accurate match rates.

The Solution

THE BOT FORGE PROVIDES
CHATBOT TRAINING DATA
CREATION SERVICES

The Bot Forge offers an artificial training data service to automate training phrase creation for your specific domain or chatbot use-case. Our process will automatically generate intent variation datasets that cover all of the different ways that users from different demographic groups might call the same intent which can be used as the base training for your chatbot.

Multi NLP platform support
Multi-language support

Our training data is not restricted solely to Dialogflow agents, the output data can be formatted for the following agent types:

rasa: Rasa JSON format
luis: LUIS JSON format
witai: Wit.ai JSON format
watson: Watson JSON format
lex: Lex JSON format
dialogflow: Dialogflow JSON format

We provide training datasets in 100+ languages

We offer our synthetic training data creation services to our chatbot clients. However, if you already have your own chatbot project and just want to boost its conversational ability we can provide synthetic training data to meet your needs.

Testing the Solution

We wanted to test the effectiveness of using our synthetic training data in a Dialogflow chatbot agent by varying the number of utterances per intent using our own synthetic training data.

Dialogflow test agents

We carried out three different tests (A B and C) with 3 separate Dialogflow agents. Each agent had identical agent settings. The agents had 3 identical intents to provide information about the topic of angel investors:

what_is_an_angel_investor
what_percentage_do_angel_investors_want
do_angel_investors_seek_control

In the first test (A) the chatbot was trained with 2 hand-tagged training phrases (utterances) per intent. Test (B) had 10 training phrases from our own synthetic training data per intent and test (C) had between 25 and 60 training phrases per intent.

The Test

We tested each agent with 12 separate questions similar to but distinct from the ones in the training sets.

We didn’t carry out any training during testing once the chatbots were created.

We recorded the % of queries matched to the correct intent, the incorrect intent or no match and also the intent detection confidence 0.0 (completely uncertain) to 1.0 (completely certain) from the agent response.

Overall test results

View the results here


	% correct match rate	% incorrect match	%no match	Average Intent Detection Confidence
Test A (2x utterances)	50%	42%	8%	0.6437837225
Test B (10x utterances)	91%	9%	0%	0.7590197883
Test C (25-60x utterances)	100%	0%	0%	0.856748325

Test A provided a 50% match rate. We observed a significant improvement in test B with the introduction of some of our synthetic training data to the agent. We were able to improve the match rate from 41% to 91% whilst TestC with 25-60 training phrases enabled a match rate of 100%. The average intent detection confidence also grew

In summary, chatbots need a decent amount of training data to provide accurate results. If there is not enough training data then a chatbots accuracy is affected and it can take some time to train it whilst being used to reach acceptable performance levels. At the same time, it can be costly and time-consuming to create training data for a chatbot needing to handle large numbers of intents.

Our synthetic training data creation service allows us to create big training sets with no effort thus reducing initial costs in chatbot creation and improving the usability of a chatbot from the initial release stages. If you only have a limited number of training phrases per intent and have large numbers of intents, our service is able to generate the rest of variants needed to go from really poor results to a chatbot with greater levels of accuracy in providing responses. We have carried out these tests with Dialogflow, but our conclusions are relevant for ML-based bot platforms in general. We can conclude that our Artificial Training Data service is able to drastically improve the results of chatbot platforms that are highly dependent on training data

Chatbot Training Never Ends!

I’ve looked at the benefits of using our training data at the early stages of a chatbot project. However, it’s important to note that the key to success, in the long run, is to constantly monitor your chatbot and continue training to get smarter. Either by doing constant training with human effort or by scheduling regular training cycles, incorporating new utterances and conversations from real users.

If you want to know more about our chatbot training data creation services get in touch

Appendix

View the test results here

January 31, 2020/0 Comments/by ajwthompson

A website chatbot to help with your business problems

Customer Support, Website Chatbot

Why create a customer support chatbot for your website.

Is your business a victim of poor customer support, slow response time, and high customer demands?

You can use a website chatbot to increase customer satisfaction and retention. Lets have a look at the problems a chatbot can solve and how a chatbot would work on your website to meet your customer service demands.

Your customers demand faster support.

As a rule, people don’t like waiting. Keeping people waiting to get initial help can be very damaging to customer experience and directly influence customer retention.

Speed of response and speed of resolution are seen as the most important aspects of the
customer service experience, regardless of channel.

Long queue of customers waiting?

In order to help a customer effectively, your support agent can speak to at most 2 users at a time.
Many queries still come in via email which can be time-consuming and often sit unanswered over long periods of time.

These types of support queries can often be handled by a website chatbot which can tap into your company knowledge base and provide support 24/7

You are spending 1000s of pounds on customer support?

Do you have a skilled but overstretched customer support team? Or you have outsourced it to an agency which doesn’t even understand your business or products?

You are struggling to deal with the more complex queries because your staff are bogged down with simple customer questions which could be handled by a website chatbot.

Generate some leads whilst you provide effective customer support.

Are you looking for new ways to generate leads, turn website visitors into customers without annoying them?

In an oversaturated market, it’s best to bank on customer service as a predictor of
customer loyalty. Companies that invest in good support not only gain through
increased loyalty and more successful upsells but also through new customers.

How does a website chatbot work?

At The Bot Forge, we create chatbots to be used at a variety of different customer touchpoints and we often find the best place for a customer support chatbot is on your website. Our chatbots connect directly to some of the most advanced AI Natural Language understanding platforms. You can read more about them here.

How can I add a chatbot onto my website?

A chatbot can be added to a website easily by just adding a small bit of code to the webpage you want to display the chatbot on. The majority of the time very little coding knowledge is needed as the complexity is handled by the code snippet which is provided. As long as you have access to your website’s code or you can contact your website developer there shouldn’t be a problem.

Companies with WordPress websites can use one of many available plugins to include the code, such as Header Footer Code Manager.

Types of chatbot window

Normally a chatbot will be added to a website in 2 different forms, a popup chat bot widget or a full-page interface.

Popup chatbot widget interface

A popup chatbot widget is a chat window which can be customised and added to your website and normally has 2 states:

Open- More often then not this will sit at the bottom right of your website. When closed you can also show a proactive message as well as the chat button.

Closed- When a user clicks the icon the chat widget will open into a chat window. In our experience, a chat widget needs to be mobile friendly and have at least 2 different display states depending on what device it’s being viewed on.

Conversational landing page interface

A chatbot interface can also be a standalone website and take up a whole webpage.

A landing page website chatbot

This can be a useful way to display to your chat bot if you want to support one particular area for your customer such as an FAQ chatbot or knowledge base. Also the best choice if you want to direct traffic to your chatbot for a marketing or advertising campaign.

Create an engaging conversational experience

To provide effective customer support a chatbot needs to send structured messages that helps users complete tasks, get information, or answer their questions.

There are several message types your bot can use: text, files, and rich media such as image, video, and audio. You can provide downloads via a URL link.

Whatever the UI choice impress users with a unique experience and match the widget to your brand and style. Follow some of these guidelines:

Show a proactive message.
Always add a help function either as part of the widget or as part of the conversational ability.
Use a beautiful greeting with emojis to encourage visitors to start chatting.
State what your chatbot can do from the off.
Use different conversational UI elements: buttons, images, cards to showcase information and provide information.
Use a combination of free text (NLU – natural language understanding) and quick replies to manage the conversation.

Extra features

Some modern browsers also support voice functionality so adding voice and input and output to your website chatbot can also be an option. Push notifications can also be integrated to provide a personalised chatbot experience.

If you feel that now is the time to create a website chatbot which will add value to your company, improve your customer support and grow your business then get in touch with us and we can help you in your chatbot journey!

January 27, 2020/0 Comments/by ajwthompson

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