What Are Chatbots and How Do They Work

Mindbowser
Chatbots Journal
Published in
4 min readSep 7, 2016

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What are chatbots ? why everyone is talking about chatbots? what can they do for my business ? how can I build a chatbot ?

Let’s get started.

What are chatbots ?

Here’s the statement by Mark Zuckerberg at the annual conference for software developers held in San Francisco on April 12th 2016 while introducing chatbots for Messenger Platform :

“We think you should message a business just the way you would message a friend,” — Mark Zuckerberg

This statement says much about chatbots than any other formal definition of it.

Chatbots are meant to mirror your messaging experience that you have with your friends to the experience with businesses.

Bots are driven by predefined set of rules which help them come up with intelligent reply to user queries. Some bots are powered with AI (Artificial Intelligence), hence they learn and adapt to complex queries and find out quick solutions just as any human would do.

Let’s understand this with a simple example :

If you wanted to buy flowers from 1–800-Flowers, the first thing that will come to your mind is to visit their website, look around for flowers you want and purchase them.

But another best alternative way could be to simply message 1–800-Flowers on Facebook.

Instead of going through their website, you will be chatting with their Facebook bot which will understand your requirement by asking you relevant questions and come up with flowers you’re looking for. All within few minutes and in much more enjoyable way rather than any mundane process which confuses the hell out of you.

Application of Chatbots is not just limited to purchasing. Let’s have a look at some other services which have already got their messenger chatbots up and running :

CNN : CNN has built a bot for Messenger for people to get CNN news and information in a personalized, private message. You can now get a news just by throwing relevant keywords to the bot.

HealthTap : HealthTap is now offering the expertise of its network of top U.S. doctors instantly via Messenger.

HP : With bots for Messenger, HP consumers will be able to print their photos, documents and files to any connected HP printer as well as receive notifications to re-order toner cartridges.

Poncho : Poncho is using bots on Messenger to send people real time local weather reports, including a new on-boarding experience and scheduled weather pushes based on your preference during on-boarding

Wall Street Journal : Get the latest headlines from the WSJ through Messenger. You can also get live stock quotes by typing “$” followed by a ticker symbol. Or you can type “lookup” followed by the company name.

This is just a starter list of bots that are already available. If you are still hungry and want to explore more examples, peruse this Messenger bot store on Botlist.

In a nutshell, you can build anything with a chatbot and there are endless possibilities. So get started and try to build kick ass chatbots to woo your customers.

So I think you must be clear now on what are bots and what they can do. Now let’s dive deeper and explore how they do it.

How Chatbots Work ?

Bots work on predefined set of rules or a program where programmer will setup a response to be given to specific commands. Here, bot will not go an extra mile to find out the response to complex queries by it’s own because it’s not programmed to do so.

Now, there are those smart bots which got their own brain to be able to understand what user wants to say and formulate the response in real time.

What kind of bot you need to build completely depends on what’s the purpose it will be serving. Whether it is going to perform functions of a store, news channel, banking activities or answering customer support queries.

As Mark pointed out in his statement, users should feel as comfortable chatting with a bot as they feel with a friend. So programmers have to shoulder the responsibility of creating a bot which will justify user experience.

Facebook has given developers, access to Chat SDKs that allow them to build interactive experiences and bots for interaction, shopping, booking travel etc.

Check out capabilities of Messenger bots

How to build one ?

  1. Identify what’s the purpose your bot will be serving
  2. Choose the platform
  3. Set up a server
  4. Choose the service to build your bot

These are the platforms which currently allow you to build a chatbot :

  • Facebook Messenger
  • Slack
  • Discord
  • Telegram
  • Kik

AI platforms that can be used for creating the rules and powering the bot decision making are :

So now you are all set to hop on an exciting ride of Chatbots. Have a good one.

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