How chatbots work

Staying in constant communication with customers is vital for any type of business. Having a channel through which all doubts, complaints, and requirements can be received can be difficult to maintain, for this there is a useful tool: a chatbot.

“A chatbot is a computer program that simulates a human conversation through voice commands, text chats, or both. Chatbot, short for chatterbot, is an artificial intelligence (AI) feature that can be integrated into and used through any major messaging app,” say experts at Investopedia.

How does an open source chatbot work?

To know this we must first know that chatbots are divided into three different types:

Simple or button-based chabot

This is the simplest type of chatbot and the one that is best suited to a tight budget. The user does not interact with the tool, it presents questions with limited response options from which the user chooses the one that best suits what they want to search for. An example of use would be when ordering a pizza, the flow of the conversation is pre-established: it presents you with the menu options and you choose one, in addition to the extras and forms of payment.

AI chatbots

As explained by Freshworks, “AI-enabled intelligent chatbots are designed to simulate near-human interactions with customers. They can have fluent conversations and understand intent, language, and feeling. These chatbots require programming to help them understand the context of interactions. They are much more difficult to implement and run and need a lot of data to learn.”

Hybrid chatbots

As the name implies, these are a combination of the first two types of chatbots. “By its very name, it is a cross between Live chat and ChatBot; that brings out the best of both worlds” is how they explain it on Medium.

“In Live Chat, there will be a customer support person who will handle all real-world queries. In Chatbot, an artificial intelligence feature simulates conversations on schedule and as needed. Whereas the brand new Hybrid type, start a chat like a Chatbot and try to resolve the customer query as soon as possible.”

The explanation of each of these shows how a chatbot works. The most popular at the moment is the NLP or natural language process chatbot, which works with artificial intelligence and adapts to the conversation with the user and their requirements or doubts.

Main steps that follow the operation of a NLP chatbot

• Tokenization – This is done by breaking a sentence into different words or tokens
• Speech: part of the speech is labeled, determining which word is a noun, verb, adjectives, etc.
• Stemming: In this step the word is shortened to its basic form.
• Recognition: This is a step where identities are found in the text that the user has typed
• Analysis: this step is vital since the bot can recognize the intention behind a sentence, being able to identify the mood of what the user wrote.

This is the way in which a chatbot works and puts its artificial intelligence into operation to be able to start a conversation with the user or the company's client and to solve their requirements or doubts.

How much should be invested in a chatbot

The creation of a chatbot for the website of a company or person is done by a developer or with the help of a software agency, who have a team of suitable experts to solve these types of problems or demands.

The time it takes to develop this tool is relative to the problem presented by the company and what they want the chatbot to cover in terms of questions and response sensitivity. Chatbot Magazine, a portal specialized in the tool, comments "The time needed to create a conversational bot for your company can range from a few hours to a maximum of 2 to 3 weeks, depending on the complexity of the project or the function you want to automate and the option you choose to create a bot. The size of the company also matters. Smaller companies would not like to invest too much time and money to build a chatbot.”

When talking about the cost of developing a chatbot, it will depend on the type of tool the company wants. There are main types of chatbots: the simple ones based on buttons or the more advanced ones with artificial intelligence technology.

The button-based chatbot costs less to develop, two to three times less than the tool powered by artificial intelligence and integrated natural language processing. The AI-powered chatbot can cost between $10,000 and $150,000, while the button-based one would cost between $5,000 and $75,000.
 

Rootstack has created various chat tools for our international customers. Don't let your clients or users spend a moment of disgust by not having good customer service, install a chatbot on your website and thus you will be able to know their doubts and concerns 24 hours a day.

We recommend you on video