3 tips to create a good Chatbot
By: Przemyslaw Jarzynski
Tags: Chatbots, Artificial Intelligence, Bots, Voice Technology, Voice Recognition

3 tips to create a good Chatbot

Photo by Maximalfocus on Unsplash

Chatbots are becoming increasingly popular and they start to appear more and more on websites and apps. Chatbots are supposed to add more of a human face to the interaction with the user, provide answers to questions and better and faster access to content than a search functionality or navigating through a website or app using a graphical interface. It is also considered by many as the first step into the Artificial Intelligence world.

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Although the idea is great, creating a chatbot that will be useful for the users and it will not frustrate them after a couple of minutes is a challenge. There are many things to think about when creating a chatbot. Below, I present the three that I consider being the most important.

1. The scope

It is generally a good idea not to give the chatbot too much to do and limit the scope. It is better if your chatbot performs only a few tasks but performs them very well than give it a wide range of tasks that the chatbot will struggle with. So apart from deciding what your chatbot should do, it is important to decide what your chatbot won’t be able to do. Make sure to also make it clear to the users of your chatbot what specific tasks the chatbot can take care of. Start small with simple tasks for your chatbot and make them perfect. Once the users start using the chatbot and you can see from the analytics that it performs well and users receive accurate answers, you can add more functionality and expand the scope.

2. Chatbot platform

A chatbot is not a tool that you’d usually develop from scratch (although you can do it). There are many chatbot platforms that will take care of processing the user input but make sure you select the right one. It is important that your chatbot platform apart from pattern-based matching is also using NLP (Natural Language Processing). NLP processes the user’s input and instead of analysing separate words and patterns, it uses AI and tries to understand the meaning of the sentence. This is very important. People are asking the same question in many different ways and it is important that your chatbot has “intelligence” to deal with these differences.

The ease of use of the tool is also very important. You won’t build a good chatbot in a day and it will require adjusting amending, improving etc. over a longer period of time so the tool to create a chatbot needs to be as user-friendly and as easy to use as possible.

3. Analytics

It is very important to measure results and how accurate in answering questions and processing users’ input your chatbot is. You won’t build it to be perfect from the start. You’ll need to look at the analytics and logs of your chatbot and make it better and better over time. People are asking the same questions is many (even thousands) different ways so your chatbot has to learn (or you need to teach it) how to respond to many different forms of the same question. It would be great if your chatbot platform supports this functionality out of the box and provide you with performance analytics and logs. But if not, make sure to build a functionality that will easily enable you to track the questions to your chatbot and answers and overall effectiveness that will allow you to make a necessary adjustment to your chatbot engine. Like anywhere else, tracking, processing data and implementing insights is crucial for successful implementation of a chatbot project.

Summary

Creating a chatbot is not an easy task and therefore deciding on the scope, your chatbot platform and implementing analytics are important things to consider at the start of the project. Limit the scope, use the right tool to create a chatbot and collect and analyse the data regularly to implement changes and improvements then you’ll be on the right track to a successful chatbot project that will benefit you and your users.

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