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!

How Much Does It Cost To Build A Chatbot In 2019?

Artificial Intelligence, Chatbots, Conversational UI, Facebook Messenger

We are often asked this 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 to build the bot and define whether it needs to be a custom chatbot or off the shelf solution.

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, Slack, Telegram, Viber, Google Assitant are just a few examples with some providing more complex UI elements which can be utilised in your bot.

There are a number of really good bot building platforms for creating 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 websites and Facebook Messenger. These Bot building platforms offer some good features: Visual Flow Editors, APIs & Webhook Integrations, Templates, Broadcasting etc. In our experience, we have found that even with free templates there are some costs due to setup and minor customisation. So our minimum price is around £600 with some monthly costs for hosting and chatbot management and training.

Natural Language Ability

If a chatbot is required to support more complex natural language processing 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 £1500. We utilise Dialogflow Natural Language Processing to offer these types of solutions.

The complexity, scope and volume of the required conversational ability effects cost. This relates to specifics such as:
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 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 £1500 – £3000

Integration

The other area which will impact cost is dependent: 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. Bots can even call systems utilising Artificial intelligence to provide relevant information based on historical chat data, for example using, https://www.tensorflow.org. With so many possibilities for bot features It’s hard to estimate the price here, but these types of chatbots cost from £4000. For each integration, we would suggest a cost of £1000-2000 it really depends on the amount of development effort required for each one.

Languages and Features

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 £500-1000 for each language.

Finally, 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 to a Web chatbot would be £500.

Flexibility

As you can see, the cost of a chatbot project can vary dependent on the features required. However, 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.

June 17, 2019/0 Comments/by ajwthompson

Developing a Chatbot? 6 Common Mistakes to Avoid

Artificial Intelligence, Chatbots, Conversational UI, Customer Support, Event Assistant, Facebook Messenger, Retail, Virtual Assistants

If you are looking to streamline certain operations of your business, implementing a chatbot is a great way to go about it. After all, you can use technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) so that it can follow different types of conversations with users and provide relevant responses where necessary.

Chatbots are no longer a gimmicky tool available on the internet, as they have gained popularity and sophistication many users are incorporating them into their digital strategy. For example, a large number of businesses now use bots as part of their customer service. As these chatbots never go offline, they are always available to assist users, at any given time of day.

It is a lot cheaper for a business to implement a bot as part of its customer service than hire employees. If you employ an individual, you have to train the person and provide a salary and vacation time. One example is one of our clients https://amicable.io who replaced call centre resource with a chatbot to book client meetings.

Chatbots have a lot of advantages, which explains why businesses want to make the most of them. However, while creating these bots, it is natural to make errors, which hampers the user experience. As this might be the first or nth time you are developing a chatbot, you want to make sure it functions as expected. Here are six common mistakes to avoid along with how you can overcome them:

Assuming every user wants to talk

You tend to believe that everyone who visits your page or installs the chatbot on Slack, or other popular messaging platforms wish to start talking to it immediately. However, most of the people on the internet don’t want to communicate with the bot, unless it is necessary.

One reason why chatbots are great marketing tools is that they can engage with prospects by answering important questions. As a result, it brings down the sales friction, making it simpler for the user to invest in what you have to offer.

If your bot starts to message the individual as soon as he/she opens it, there is a high chance the person will find it annoying. A better practice would be to wait for the user to respond or you can leave instructions in the description on how to start conversing with the chatbot. Our sports events Facebook Messenger chatbot Carly utilises this kind of functionality enabling users to set push notifications for their any new sports events based on their own criteria.

Failing to track its performance

Since the chatbot makes use of the latest technological advancements in the industry, you might assume that you shouldn’t keep an eye on its performance. After all, you spent a considerable portion of your time training it, so that it can have a continuous conversation with your customers.

However, you will never know the effectiveness of your bot, if you don’t track the key performance indicators (KPI). These metrics provide a deeper insight into how you can continue to improve your chatbot. For example, you can see where most of the users tend to leave the conversation. With this data, you can think of different ways to keep them engaged so that they continue to talk to your bot. We feel that the history and training tools provided by Dialogflow enable us to track chatbot performance effectively.

Forgetting to list in directories

Once the chatbot is up and running on various messaging platforms or your website, you think you completed your job. All your visitors have to do is start talking to the bot, and it will help them in their tasks.

However, not everyone will know about the existence of your chatbot. Several messaging platforms may not have powerful search, which makes it harder to discover your bot. The best practice is to find third-party websites and lists your chatbot in it. As a result, if people look for your bot on Google or other search engines, the chances of it popping up in the first page of results goes up significantly. The best place to market your own new bot is on your website, why not write a blog post about your chatbot journey, you can guarantee other companies will be interested in your journey.

Impersonal conversations

The reason why people don’t like talking to bots is that the conversation tends to be boring and bland. As a result, they prefer to converse with human beings, as the experience is better in every way.

Think about it, would you like talking to a chatbot which sounds like it is speaking in a monotone? Rather than putting your bot in the same position, you should think of different ways to spice up the conversation. For example, you can ask the user what the chatbot should call the individual while talking to one another.

One thing is key here and we have seen this in our experience: to gain better customer satisfaction it’s better to explain to your users that your bot is a chatbot and not try and masquerade as a human. If users are aware they are talking to a chatbot from the off it will gain confidence and improve the customer experience as the user becomes more forgiving.

Not paying attention to its tone

Since the entire conversation between the chatbot and its users is going to take place via text, you need to pay close attention to its tone. Using the right type of communication will determine whether your bot performs well among its intended target audience.

While this tends to be challenging, there are several ways you can overcome this obstacle. For example, you can ask a small number of people from your target audience, what tone they would find appropriate. At the same time, you can also have a beta group, which allows you to experiment and see which one works well. Matching tone to the industry and subject matter is important to build a satisfying experience for your chatbot users.

Help and Live Agents

Since the purpose of the chatbot is to reduce the workload of your employees, you tend to assume that you don’t need a live agent. The problem with testing is that it may not take into account all the variables present in real-world scenarios. As a result, when you deploy your chatbot, it might not know how to handle a specific question.

Due to this reason, it can go on an endless loop, and the only way out of the conversation is to quit or restart the chatbot. An excellent way to overcome this problem is to allow your chatbot to ask a live agent to join the conversation during this situation. Once the employee helps out the user, he/she can provide information to the developers on how to improve the communication skills of the bot.

It’s also important to provide easy help for users to access during the bot conversation. At The Bot Forge we always implement a help feature for our chatbots so users know what they can do and how they get back on track our Facebook Messenger chatbot for the Fred Whitton Challenge is a perfect example.

Chatbots are becoming a great tool for businesses. You can use them to make life easier for your clients, by assisting them in various functions. By knowing what the common mistakes are, you can avoid them entirely and design the best bots in the industry

May 2, 2019/0 Comments/by ajwthompson

Why Dialogflow?

Dialogflow

Dialogflow is Google’s human-computer interaction developer which is based on natural language conversations. At The Bot Forge, Dialogflow is our platform of choice for chatbot construction.

There’s three main reasons for why we’re amongst companies such as Domino’s and Ticketmaster who make Dialogflow their chatbot platform of choice.

Flexible coding: Thanks to Dialogflow’s in-line code editor, the time taken to complete code-related tasks is quicker than with other platforms. The prime benefit here is that we’re then able to spend more time perfecting the conversational experience.
Scalability: Whether you start with 1,000 or 100,000 users, the platform can scale to your needs. As Dialogflow is hosted on the Google Cloud Platform, this allows the potential to support a user base of hundreds of millions, if required.
Inbuilt machine learning: Arguably the biggest benefit of the platform in comparison to others is the availability of machine learning and natural language processing technologies. The access to these features allow us to create a richer and more natural conversational experience for your users. Dialogflow makes this possible by allowing us to extract data from a given conversation, in order to train our agents to understand user intents. Plus, as the technologies are already built into the platform, we’re able to construct your application much faster.

To ensure that we’re using the right platform for our clients’ needs, we continuously refresh our knowledge of other bot construction tools, such as The Microsoft Bot Framework. A benefit of using this platform from a developer’s perspective is the availability of templates to choose from, which allow for a more time efficient development. The IBM Watson Assistant is another platform that a developer may favour, as the testing the bot is simpler than it is on other competing platforms. If a priority is to feature your bot over a wide range of locations, Recast.AI may be a good option for its availability on 14 different platforms.

But, these platforms aren’t without their weaknesses. Unlike Dialogflow, Microsoft Bot Framework is lacking in the tools which help to create the “brains” of the bot, which is important for the sophistication that users are beginning to expect. Also, a downside of IBM Watson Assistant is the unintuitive relationship between intents (representation of user’s meaning) and entities (expressions recognised in categories). If you’re interested in how Dialogflow utilises intents and entities, we will be covering this in a future blog post.

Although we understand that there are features of other platforms which can make the development process more efficient, the inbuilt machine learning features of Dialogflow means we can deliver a bot that can produce a much richer conversational experience.

January 31, 2019/0 Comments/by Natasha Nayga

Dialogflow Announce v1 API will be deprecated in October 2019

Artificial Intelligence, Chatbots, Conversational UI, Dialogflow

The Dialogflow team announced that they would be deprecating their V1 version of the Dialogflow api in Oct 2019

You can read about their official announcement here

The Bot Forge have been following the progress of the latest V2 api since its official launch in April this year, it’s no surprise that the Dialogflow team have made this announcement as they concentrate their efforts on the new API. However it does have some serious implications for existing chatbots utilising the v1 API.

Migration

You can see some more details about upgrading from V1 to V2 in the official guide here. We also aim to provide some more detailed information about carrying out an upgrade on this blog so watch out for that.

Anyone who already has built out their website chatbots using v1 API, then they should start planning for the migration sooner rather than later. Any new features should be added after the upgrade. The migration is potentially a non-trivial task, considering some chatbots have some fairly complex code driving their fulfilment. If you have a live bot in production our advice is to set up an upgrade chatbot as a copy of your existing bot project and then work through the upgrade there. You can guarantee that changing to V2 will mean that fulfilment and API calls may stop working. Once the upgrade is complete re-testing all bot functionality is strongly advised before setting live.

Chatbot Web Interfaces

We would recommend everyone who is creating custom website chatbots to do so using the v2 API. All our new chatbots are built using the v2API.

The big change for v2 is that it uses Google’s OAuth2 for its authentication, with v1 you could simply use the client access token when calling the v1 API. Implementing the features required to authenticate against the new v2 API means some significant extra development effort.

If you need assistance or advice with your own chatbot v2 upgrade please get in touch, we are Dialogflow experts and would be happy to help!

At the Bot Forge, we specialise in building chatbots so you feel free to contact us if you want to discuss further.

October 30, 2018/0 Comments/by ajwthompson

Why using chatbots for business can help you remain competitive

Artificial Intelligence, Chatbots, Conversational UI

Chatbots For Business

The business landscape is evolving faster and faster, we look at using chatbots for business to help you remain competitive.

There is so much coverage of artificial intelligence technology and chatbots these days There is no doubt that chatbots are big news for many different industries, from e-commerce and fashion to healthcare and banking.

Whilst many big brands have already jumped at the opportunity to leverage the technology for others it’s challenging to see where they can be a benefit to your company and whether the cost and effort involved is worthwhile. Some of you may remember many years ago when you were approached by someone selling a shiny website and then later on a new app? You probably asked yourself a similar set of questions..that’s nice and shiny but why do I want it? is it right for us? First things first let’s look at some of the basics.

Chatbots for business - what is a chatbot

The chatbot lowdown

What is a chatbot?

Briefly put a chatbot is a service, powered by natural language processing rules and artificial intelligence (AI), that you interact with via a voice or text-based chat interface. AI technology is used to enable the service to respond to specific user interaction. For example, a user could ask a chatbot a question or give it an instruction and the bot could respond or perform an action as appropriate.

This chat service can take on any number of roles, providing answers, collecting customer information, suggesting products and making sales. They can live in any major chat product (Facebook Messenger, Skype, SMS, Slack, Telegram, Viber, Twitter, Website). They can also be deployed into voice-enabled assistants such as Amazon Echo or Google home. Chatbots can also be developed to include multiple language capability.

Where can a chatbot be used?

Chatbots have been deployed in many different guises as they are extremely flexible and able to take on whatever business need arises.

You could say the possibilities are endless, here are some examples:

Celebrity

www.m.me/katyperry
Katy Perry’s official Facebook Messenger bot.

Customer Service

Vodafone TOBi
Vodafone’s customer service chatbot is based on IBM’s Watson & provides a fully integrated webchat for customers.

Productivity

AceBot
https://slack.com/apps/A0GRU84TF-ace
AceBot a productivity tool with expense tracking & intelligent task management, deployed in Slack.

Sports and Events

www.m.me/fredwhittonchallenge
The Saddleback Fred Whitton Challenge sportive bot is a smart events assistant providing event info to participants.

E-Commerce

www.m.me/LEGO
The official Lego Facebook Messenger bot. Ready to help your next LEGO purchase.

Health

www.m.me/superizzyai
Izzy is a period tracking and pill reminder chatbot.

Chatbots for business

The benefits of using chatbots for your business

Provide stellar customer service 24/7

For many businesses, the biggest challenge to serving your customers in several communication channels is responding quickly all of the time.

Constantly available

One of the great benefits of a chatbot is the constant availability. Customer expectations are high expecting a quick response to enquiries. With a chatbot, you can offer your customers a service which is available 24 hours a day even when there are no employees in the office. You can rely on your bot no matter what time of the day or day of the week or timezone the enquiry is coming from.

One example from my own personal experience was with a SAAS which had charged me incorrectly for an amount of money which caused my bank account to go overdrawn. I contacted the customer support chatbot via a web interface at 1 AM and the problem was rectified and money returned promptly the next day. I went from disgruntled to a satisfied customer in a 5-minute chatbot interaction, incidentally, I’m still a customer!

It’s also worth noting that chatbots can be enabled to understand multiple languages. NLP technology will understand queries in different languages and respond appropriately. So if you support a global customer base needing to support multiple language enquiries this does not have to be a problem.

System integration

With the correct integration development, a chatbot is able to answer complex enquiries by integrating with existing CRM, ERP, CMS, and other business-critical applications.
Connect your chatbot seamlessly with your entire business ecosystem.

Scalable

Chatbots are scalable and capable of handling multiple enquiries, ready to step up when enquiry demands are at their peak.

A well implemented and executed chatbot can give businesses the ability to have more conversations and help more people at once than other alternatives, for example, live chat applications on websites.

This ability to handle the frequent enquires where the responses are often similar facilitates businesses in freeing up staff to deal with the more complex issues.

Although a chatbot cannot handle all customer queries, it can be used to deal with a large number of the routine business enquiries which most companies deal with on a day to day basis.

They improve customer satisfaction

To avoid frustration, a chatbot can be developed to use a “sentiment” function to pass users onto a real advisor if the bot can’t help or if they are not satisfied.
Other benefits can be seen in customer service gains. According to Jon Davies, head of digital at Vodafone, their customer service chatbot, TOBI provides “a far more engaging and personal” customer experience, as well as improving completion rates and reducing transaction times. These types of successes are highlighted in improved net promoter scores (NPS).

Overall chatbots for business can excel in supporting customer service teams in their communications with customers. Providing accessible information 24/7 saves businesses money and time. By 2022 chatbots are expected to save $8 billion7.

Chatbots for business- Drive Sales, Engagement, reach

Drive sales, engagement, reach

These days customers are savvier and demand an intuitive and seamless customer experience. Businesses need to consider using technology to fit in with their communication habits.

Familiar messaging technology

Many users prefer social media and mobile platforms for communication and expect businesses to be online when they are. If users are having a conversation with a chatbot in Facebook Messenger, they are using a conversation channel they are familiar with and they are already using the technology and don’t need to install a new app. The numbers of messenger app users have been steadily rising. As of April 2017 Facebook Messenger had 1.2 billion monthly active users worldwide

Use these channels to reach new and existing customers.

It’s also important to note that 2 out of 3 customers actually prefer to message a business to submit an enquiry rather than use other more traditional channels such as email or phone. Every day 1.4 billion people around the world send over 50 billion messages to communicate with each other. As messaging becomes even more central in people’s lives, demand for service in messaging has continued to rise.

The rise of voice assistants

Voice assistant technology and it’s adoption has gathered serious momentum over the past couple of years. User expectations are rising as they become educated in what it can do. As customers realise that its capabilities go beyond setting a timer, turning down the lights or playing some music; they will look to this channel to make purchases, contact customer support or use as a tool for business specific tasks.

The latest from Google Popular voice assistants currently include Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Google Now, Google Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana. The big players are investing heavily in perfecting voice interfaces, read the latest from http://www.thebotforge.io/google-assistant-news-from-io2018/ and http://www.thebotforge.io/google-assistant-demo-duplex-makes-phonecall-io-2018/

The reach of this sort of technology cannot be underestimated. You can read some of the stats and predictions for voice technology here.

Marketing clout

As an effective marketing tool chatbots can give your company an edge as they can enter into personalized and automated communication with your customers.

Using platforms such as Facebook messenger, substituting emails with push notifications can obtain much higher click-through rates. Used wisely opt-in targeted messages or push notifications have 90% read rates and a 40% click-through rate. Chatbots can be used to send users personalised tips, greetings and information, generating leads, harvesting reviews and forging stronger customer relationships.

Utilising these techniques a chatbot is able to reach participants wherever they are, regardless of where the chat session was initiated, whether on a mobile app, a website and even from social platforms such as Facebook Messenger.

Businesses are finding chatbots to be a great tool to engage with their market: “Our target customers are early adopters of social innovation so a chatbot is the perfect vehicle for us to communicate with them”, Sarah Gower, Adidas.

Sales

Chatbots are ideal to answer first customer questions. if the chatbot decides that it can not effectively serve the customer, it can pass those customers to human agents. High value, responsive leads will be called by live agents increasing sales effectiveness.

Chatbots can be used to answer customer’s questions and promote products. Engage with the right customer by analyzing their profile and historical data and user characteristics. A bot can provide a channel for purchasing easily and quickly if requested.

Chatbots for business - conclusion

Conclusion

I’ve really only scratched the surface of chatbot and voice interface technology capabilities and what can be achieved and how it can help your business be more competitive. However, it’s important to consider them carefully. It’s up to the business to decide if a chatbot is a right move for them, for some the business case may not be there or something to consider in the future. Building a chatbot because you think you should or because its the latest thing can only result in wasted time, money and effort.

I hope you find this post helpful in considering how using chatbots for business can help you to achieve a competitive edge.

If you already have a chatbot idea and want to look into this further have a look at our post planning the best chatbot

At the Bot Forge, we specialise in building chatbots so you feel free to contact us if you want to discuss further.

June 28, 2018/0 Comments/by ajwthompson

Planning the best chatbot

Artificial Intelligence, Chatbots, Conversational UI

Planning the best chatbot: 10 questions to answer

Congratulations you’ve had that lightbulb moment and you have an idea to create the best chatbot, or maybe you’ve heard so much about chatbots lately you feel you should explore the idea of using one for your company. If you want to read more about how a chatbot can help your company read our Why using chatbots for business can help you remain competitive blog post

Best chatbot idea

Whatever the reason now its time to start looking at your idea in more detail to plan the best chatbot..but wait that can be hard. Don’t worry, we can help!

Chatbots have progressed rapidly over the past couple of years with advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) utilised used across voice and text driven interfaces. There has never been a better time to start a conversational UI project. However its still vitally important to plan your project carefully.

At The Bot Forge, we like to ask our clients the following questions to ensure we have a clear understanding of what they want to achieve with their chatbot project.

So whether you are looking at creating your own bot, or commisioning a team of chatbot experts like ourselves 😉 then it’s important to ask yourself the following 10 questions before you start building the best chatbot.

10 questions to answer to plan the best chatbot

1. What is the purpose of your chatbot?

Why do you want to create a chatbot? What do you want the chatbot to do for your business and how will it achieve your business goals?

Right from the beginning of the project, it? s important for yourself and team to have a clear understanding about what your chatbot will do

2. What are the key goals of your chatbot?

What are the main aims of your chatbot? It could be to drive sales, provide 24/7 customer support or engage with new and existing customers by gathering customer feedback and delivering new product information.

3. How will you measure your chatbot’s success

How will you determine the success of your chatbot? What will your Key Performance Indicators (KPI) be?

For example, you could look at click-through rates, the numbers of enquiries handled correctly or feedback statistics gathered.

4. Who is going to use your chatbot?

Have a clear idea about who is going to use your chatbot, what will be the user demographic? This may influence your chatbot’s persona.

5. Where will your chatbot be deployed?

Your audience should drive your chatbot platform choice if possible. If you can collect information on which messenger platforms your audience use then this should assist your decision. Now is also a good time to consider voice platforms such as Alexa or Google Home.
With over 1 billion active users Facebook Messenger is our favourite messaging platform.

6. What will your chatbot do?

Here you can really start to consider what sort of functionality the chatbot needs to provide and most importantly the conversations it will be able to support.
A good way to capture chatbot requirements is by looking at them as user stories. The story is in the same format: As a , I want , so that: for example:
– I?m a participant, I want to check what time I can start my event, so that I can be ready to leave in good time.
– As a business, I want to collect customer reviews, so that I can improve their experience.
– As a customer, I want to access my account details quickly and receive an account update through my personal assistant.

7. Will the chatbot have a character?

Will the chatbot have its own persona, will it have a character?
Is the chatbot going to just be a polite assistant or does it need a character to carry through your brand?

8. How will the chatbot create value?

Think about the overall chatbot experience for users. How will the chatbot ensure that users come back?
For example by providing a simple and well executed personal assistant then customers are going to use this as their first port of call to find information and/or contact your company.

9. How will people find the chatbot?

How are you going to drive people to find and use your chatbot?
Links on your website and also advertising on Facebook can be great places to start as well as content on your Facebook page.

10. How will you look after your chatbot?

How will you monitor the chatbots performance after its launch? In comparison to other projects, it’s important to note that once the chatbot is launched this is just the start of your journey. Essentially you are at the start of the optimization phase. You will need to provide resources to get the most out of your chatbot after it’s launch.
You will need to monitor user interactions, reactions, unanswered requests: so you can train your chatbot and improve overall user experience, training your chatbot is key!

Best Chatbot - Ready to start building

Conclusion

After working through these 10 questions you should be well on your way to understanding your chatbot concept.

With all our new clients at The Bot Forge chatbot agency, we ask them to fill out our chatbot checklist, feel free to download and work through with other members of your team.

We hope you find this post helpful in getting to grips with your chatbot project, feel free to share if you find the 10 questions useful.

At the Bot Forge, we specialise in building chatbots so you feel free to contact us if you want to discuss further.

June 15, 2018/0 Comments/by ajwthompson

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