Mitul Makadia — January 15, 2018 I’m sure most of you must’ve interacted with a chatbot by now on Facebook Messenger. It is adopted by thousands of companies and becoming more and more popular. There are two concepts which everyone gets confused while understanding a chatbot platform, and that common confusion is between chatbot development platform and publishing platform. We will consider an example to know what a chatbot publishing platform is.
Let’s consider a scenario, you want to buy some clothes, the first thought that would come to your mind is to go to a mall and get it. Now if there wasn’t any mall then you would have to search the city for clothing shops which will be a hassle. Since the mall is available to you, you didn’t have to search for any other shops. Likewise, a publishing platform is an environment where you can experience a chatbot. The popular chatbot publishing platforms are FB Messenger, Kik, Slack, Telegram, and WeChat.
So, if you are thinking about jumping on the chatbot bandwagon, here are the top 14 chatbot platforms you should know about:
1. Chatfuel
Any person without any knowledge of coding can create his/her own bot on Facebook Messenger using Chatfuel. It provides features like adding content cards and sharing it to your followers automatically, gathering information inside Messenger chats with forms and let users request info and interact with your bot with buttons. Since people are more comfortable with chatting than selecting options from a chatbot. It also provides Artificial Intelligence technology for scripting interactive conversations. And using AI to recognize user answers to provide the appropriate response.
It is completely free for anyone to make a bot on its chatbot platform. Although after your bot reaches 100K conversations/month you will have to contact their team to subscribe as a premium customer. Many multinational companies like Adidas, MTV, British Airways, Volkswagen etc are using Chatfuel for their Facebook Messenger chatbots.
2. Botsify
Botsify is another popular Facebook Messenger chatbot platform using drag and drop template to create bots. Features people want to create chatbots like Easy integrations via plugins, Smart AI, Machine learning and analytics integration are available. Although Machine learning and AI integration would be tough for people who do not have technical knowledge, it’s drag and drop template substitutes for making the process simple.
There will be a situation when you would want to take over the chat from the bot. And for this situation, Botsify provides human takeover ability for a smooth transition from a bot to a human. The botsify platform is free for one bot and payable thereafter.
3. Flow XO
The only chatbot platform to provide over 100 integrations. It boasts an easy to use and visual editor. Using Flow XO we can build bots once for many platforms, unlike other platforms where we have to make a bot again. With pre-built templates at your disposal to for a quick start, it helps you save a lot of time in thinking. It also provides all other functionalities like the two platforms explained above. It is limited to a certain number of conversation, upon which a subscription has to be made for further use.
4. Beep Boop
This chatbot platform provides an end-to-end developer experience that allows users to focus on building great bots. And also helps Slack users by making it effortless to discover and launch bots while leaving all of the build, integration, deployment, management and scaling to us. Beep Boop is more focused on providing the best, easiest, and most obvious place to run Slack bots.
Firstly, you have to set up your code using Github, the popular version control repository, and Internet hosting service. Then input it into the Beep Boop platform to link it with your Facebook Messenger or Slack application. The bots will then be able to interact with your customers with real-time chat and messaging.
5. Bottr
Bottr is an interesting concept to make your personal bot from your real Facebook, LinkedIn & Twitter account.
We got our bot ready in less than 5 minutes, and it has created questions automatically from Facebook data.
For example,
- Where did you study?
- Education background
- Who are you?
- When were you born?
- Where do you live?
Bottr gives you an option to embed your bot on your website. You can also add data from a medium, WordPress, Wikipedia for better data coverage.
6. Motion.ai
Motion.ai is a chatbot platform to visually build, train, and deploy chatbots on FB Messenger, Slack, Smooch or your website. It lets you diagram your conversation flow like a flowchart to get a visual overview of the outcomes of a bot query. Then connect your bot to a messaging service like Slack, Facebook Messenger, and go. Motion.ai allows you to deploy Node.js code directly from its interface along with several other integrations.
7. Chattypeople
The chatbot platform has predefined chatbots ready to start-off. The website has templates for e-commerce, customer support, and food business. If you select on e-commerce chat bot you only have to add Products, Q&A, and some general settings. Even have Paypal and Stripe API integration. A rudimentary customer question FAQ section is also available.
The chatbot platform’s simplicity makes it ideal for entrepreneurs and marketers in smaller companies. While its technology makes it suitable for enterprise customers. You can make a simple bot answering customer service questions or integrate it with Shopify to monetize your Facebook fan pages.
8. QnA maker
Microsoft has created QnA bot for the same reason as the name suggests i.e for answering the questions. You have to share the URL of your FAQ page and the bot will be created in a few minutes using the information on the FAQ page and structured data.
Further, we can Integrate Microsoft Cognitive Services to enable your bot to see, hear, interpret and interact in more human ways. QnA Maker also integrates with other APIs and solutions seamlessly And scales to be a know-it-all part of a bigger bot or great standalone.
9. Recast.ai
Recast.ai is a bot building platform that enables you to train, build and run your bot. By creating and managing your conversation logic with Bot Builder, our visual flow management interface and API, you can build bots that understand predefined queries and set up responses very quickly. They provide messaging metrics and bot analytics tools to enhance and fasten its understanding.
In conclusion, it is the ultimate collaborative platform to build, train, deploy and monitor intelligent bots.
10. ChatterOn.io
ChatterOn is a bot development platform which gives you the required tools to build Facebook Messenger chatbots without any coding. The platform helps you build the bot flow (each interaction with a user has to have a goal that the user has to be taken to the next chat) and setup the AI by entering a few examples of the expected conversation between the user and bot. ChatterOn is India’s first full stack chatbot development platform and far superior in ease of development and functionalities than its international counterparts.
All the bots on ChatterOn’s platform are powered by a proprietary self-learning contextual AI.
In conclusion, chatbot platforms are essential for the development of chatbots. With the availability of such platforms, anyone without programming knowledge can create a basic chatbot. But to make an intelligent chatbot, you would require the use of AI, machine learning, and natural language processing. Chatbots are going to revolutionize the future of industries by its rich features. Customer satisfaction is key to market growth and chatbots are going to be the single biggest benefit to those who adopt them. It will reduce the human errors, provide round the clock availability, eliminate the need for multiple mobile applications and make it a very seamless experience for the customer.
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