The Ultimate Guide to AI Chatbot Development [9 steps]

The business infrastructure is growing at flash speed. In the past decade, numerous trends and technologies have elevated the business competition so much that almost every company faces a run for its money at certain times. Technologies like AI, Big Data, 5G, IoT, and many others are key promoters of business growth.

One of the technologies that have significantly impacted the business landscape is chatbots, aka AI chatbots. Though many of you are aware of it, if not, do look for a chat window on a company website next time. The mini box on the bottom right of the window is a nudge from the chatbot.

An AI chatbot is of use for business in numerous ways, and its demand is increasing. A clear proof of that is the chatbot market. As per the stats, the chatbot market is expected to reach the $1.25 billion mark by 2025.

So, if you plan to harness the ability of an AI chatbot for your business, read this guide carefully!

What is an AI chatbot?

An AI chatbot is a program that leverages the power of AI and numerous other technologies and data to provide appropriate human-like responses to its users. The chatbot aims to interpret the natural language queries from the users and generate appropriate responses in return.

AI chatbots have applications in various application domains, such as information retrieval, customer service, virtual assistants, etc. Some of the best examples of AI-based chatbots are Slush, Cortana, Siri, etc. If we go onto some advanced chatbots, they are ChatGPT, Google Bard, Jasper, etc.

Why you should build an AI chatbot?

Here are some key reasons why you might want to build an AI chatbot with real-life examples.

Provide 24/7 customer support

Chatbots can handle customer queries and provide assistance around the clock, improving customer experience and reducing wait times compared to human agents alone. Spotify's 24/7 AI chatbot instantly assists users with password resets, troubleshooting, FAQs, and account info retrieval, fielding 83% of queries cost-effectively.

Save costs

Chatbots are generally less expensive to Deploy and maintain than hiring human agents for customer support roles. They can handle many routine queries cost-effectively. Aeromexico's chatbot "Aerobot" allows customers to check flight status, retrieve booking information, and get answers to common queries, reducing call volumes to human agents by 30%.

Increase sales and lead generation

Chatbots can qualify leads, provide product information, and guide customers through the sales process to drive more conversions. Pizzahut's chatbot "upsells" things like desserts and drinks after taking a pizza order. Pizza Hut reports around 70% of their total online order traffic now comes through the chatbot ordering channel.

Improve efficiency

Chatbots can handle multiple conversations in parallel and retrieve information quickly from databases, increasing efficiency over humans for certain repetitive tasks. HDFC Bank's chatbot "Eva" can pull up over 8 years' worth of customer policy details and transaction history in a few seconds to resolve queries faster.

Collect customer data for a marketing campaign

Chatbots log all interactions, providing data that can be analyzed to improve products, services, and the chatbot itself over time. Domino's pizza-ordering chatbot collects data on popular topping combinations, busiest hours, etc. which helps them optimize production and increase upsell opportunities.

Provide consistent responses

Unlike humans, chatbots will provide consistent, on-brand responses every time based on their training data. The CDC's chatbot provides consistent, verified information about COVID-19 symptoms, testing, and the latest guidelines directly from the authoritative source.

Integrate with services

Chatbots can integrate with other systems like calendars, knowledge bases, CRMs, etc. to provide a seamless, automated experience. Marriott International's chatbot integrates with multiple services and APIs to provide a seamless experience for everything from booking to managing a guest's entire stay.

Types of AI chatbots - Latest and most relevant

There are several types of AI chatbots, with new variations and capabilities emerging frequently as the technology advances. Here are some of the most relevant and latest types:

Retrieval-based chatbots

These chatbots use predefined responses and rules to provide answers from a knowledge base. They are relatively simple but can be effective for narrow, well-defined domains. Examples: FAQ chatbots, and customer service chatbots.

Generative chatbots

These use natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to understand queries and generate new, contextually relevant responses. They can handle more open-ended conversations. Examples: Anthropic's Claude, Google's LaMDA.

Task-oriented chatbots

Chatbots are designed to assist with specific tasks like booking tickets, making appointments, or providing recommendations. They use NLP and may integrate with backend systems. Examples: Travel booking chatbots, and scheduling assistants.

Conversational AI assistants

More advanced chatbots that can engage in freeform conversations, understand context and intent, and assist with complex queries across domains. Examples: Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant.

Chatbots with multimodal interfaces

These combine conversational AI with other input modes like touch, voice, vision, and augmented reality for more natural interactions. Examples: Chatbots in AR/VR environments.

Emotionally intelligent chatbots

Incorporating emotional AI to detect and respond appropriately to human emotions and build rapport. Examples: Mental health counseling chatbots.

Chatbots for specific vertical industries or domain-specific

Chatbots optimized for use cases like healthcare, finance, e-commerce, etc. Examples: Medical diagnosis chatbots, and banking chatbots.

As AI capabilities advance, we'll likely see even more specialized and multimodal chatbot types emerge to provide seamless, intelligent digital experiences across industries.

Components for building an AI chatbot

As easy as it may seem to give the command to a chatbot and get the desired result, the actual work is much more complex in the backend. The working of an AI chatbot has numerous technologies and components backing it. Let’s take a look at those components!

There are two primary categories among which the A chatbot components are divided!

The UI components

Everything related to what a user sees and experiences comes in UI components. UI components include

• The user interface has all the visual components like buttons, text boxes, fields, etc.
• The user experience component includes the way things happen on the screen, like the navigation, animations, etc. Anything that improves the feel of the website.
• Conversation design is the third and the most crucial UI component. It focuses on developing the part about how the chatbot is going to interact or communicate with the users. The elements of a conversation design are flow and scripting. The flow part further includes context, entities, and intent that decide what the chatbot will say. The scripting part develops the chatbot's personality (like how the chatbot says something). In short, the conversation design includes uncovering conversation paths, responses, and fonts.

The functional components

The functional components behind an AI chatbot are much trickier than the UI components. Here are the functional components of the AI chatbot!

• Natural language processing is the most critical part of an AI chatbot. Generative AI and NLP help the chatbot understand user inputs, whether it is text or voice.
• Machine learning algorithms ensure that the chatbot is trained on the data. It is done via supervised and unsupervised learning.
• The knowledge base is the information repository that holds the information required by the chatbot to answer user queries. It can be product information, FAQs, etc.
• Dialogue management is another functional component of the AI chatbot. Dialogue management checks the flow of the conversation while taking care of the context, intents, and responses.

How to build an AI chatbot from scratch

When it comes to developing AI chatbots, you usually have three options

1. Develop a custom chatbot 
2. Build a chatbot using ready-to-use tools 
3. The right amalgamation of both the above-listed options 

Here are the 9 steps that help you create the right conversational flow and build a robust AI chatbot. Let’s begin the journey. 

Step 1: Define chatbot purpose and use cases

AI chatbots can be used for different purposes and use cases. So the first step is to be very specific about your precise purpose and use cases for developing the bot. To understand your needs, you need to answer the questions listed below. 

• What is your ultimate purpose for developing a chatbot? Do you want to improve customer experience, generate leads, automate customer support, or anything else? Your purpose could be one or a combination of multiple objectives.  
• What are the most common chatbot use cases in your business and industry? Identify the use cases by checking for the queries you receive and evaluating potential examples in your domain.
• What are the essential features that you want to incorporate in the chatbot? You can decide on must-have features based on your business needs.

Once you have answers to the first two questions, it will be easy to define the features and type of chatbot you want to build. 

Step 2: Decide a channel where you want to launch it

The next important step is to decide the channel where you want to integrate and use the chatbot. Ensure integrating it across every platform, where your customers frequently interact with your brand. The most common platforms that you should consider are 

• Website
• Mobile Application
• Social media platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, etc. 

If you are confused about picking the right channels, here are some tips to consider

• You must integrate the chatbot on your website and mobile app as customer interactions happen frequently on these channels. People prefer to connect with you directly to get help with their queries. 
• Large-scale companies have a large customer base that interacts with their brand through different channels. In such cases, deploying the chatbot on multiple channels is the right approach. 

If you are a multi-national brand, you need to set the tone, style, and content of the chatbot by considering target audiences from multiple regions. 

Step 3: Select the AI model or framework for your chatbot

Now that you have clarity about which chatbot variant you want to create and for what channels. The next step is to select the right technology stack. It is suggested to get help from experts to make the right decision. 

• Ready-to-use AI builders are available in the market that allows to build a chatbot with the required customization. It's a less time-consuming approach. 
• To build a bot with AI frameworks, you can consider platforms like Microsoft Bot, Google Dialogflow, IBM Watson, etc.
• You can develop a chatbot by leveraging cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure, AWS, IBM Cloud, Google Cloud Resources, and other platforms. It helps deploy, manage, and scale your machine learning workload and NLP engine. 
• Using AI and ML platforms, you can build an AI chatbot from scratch. The platform offers various libraries and resources including Pyourch, Tensorflow, Scitkit, Pre-trained language models, Langchain, LLamIndex, PineCone.io, and more.

Step 4: Build a knowledge base

To make the AI chatbot smarter, you need to feed it with intelligent insights. It can learn and train itself using that data or knowledge base. If you are looking for where to get this information? You can consider three options that involve 

• Internal Data
• Public Datasets
• Generated Data

Step 5: Design a user-friendly chatbot interface

Using drag-and-drop building blocks, you can design the conversation flow for the chatbot. It allows you to create chat sequences that meet your specific business needs. 

For example; if you are an eCommerce company, you can set the sequence of sending a welcome message, asking for which product they are looking for, sharing the particular product page, sending a message that helps the customers to make a decision, and sending a discount message if applicable. 

This is the basic conversational sequence that you can consider. Ensure to mention that they are using the AI chatbot. Also, add the clause of your website's privacy policy to avoid future conflicts. 

Step 6: Train and fine-tune your AI chatbot

Companies that are opting for simple chatbots, developed using decision tree flows, do not need to train their product. When you need to understand the customer intent, you need to train the chatbot by adding an NLP trigger. 

By training the bot, you can analyze the most common customer conversations, queries, and concerns. Adding the answer manually or using a tool will help you respond to their questions faster and more effectively. 

Step 7: Integrate the chatbot and conduct rigorous testing

Once you are done with fine-tuning the AI chatbot, you can integrate it into your defined channels. To check whether it works smoothly, you need to test the chatbot. 

You can receive a preview link from the AI chatbot development company. It gives you an idea about your chatbot’s look and feel. To make any changes, you can share a change request with your technology partner.  

Step 8: Collect feedback from users

Feedback from customers is essential to understand the impact of chatbots. You need to conduct an automated survey using the chatbot. Understand the satisfaction level of the users with your bot conversation and explore what changes they want. It helps you make the conversation more effective and smooth. Implement the changes suggested by the users to increase user interactions with your chatbot.   

Step 9: Monitor chatbot analytics and improve it

Lastly, keep monitoring your chatbot activity. It helps you understand where your bot is lacking in delivering the best customer experience. You can identify those spots and improve them. Moreover, you can recognize the best part that works excellently for you. You can check where else you can apply that tactic in the existing conversation flow. 

Following these steps, you can build a chatbot that empowers each interaction with the customers by sharing invaluable and precise information with them. It helps you drive better engagement and increase conversions.

How much does it cost to build an AI chatbot?

Well, the cost of building an AI chatbot can vary significantly depending on several factors such as types of chatbot, development processes, integrations, model training data, and multimodel interfaces. Explore them in brief:

Type of chatbot

The complexity and capabilities of the chatbot play a big role in determining costs. A simple retrieval-based chatbot with predefined responses will be less expensive than an advanced generative chatbot using large language models.

Development approach

Building a chatbot from scratch using internal resources requires significant investment in AI expertise, data labeling, and computing infrastructure. Using off-the-shelf chatbot platforms/APIs or engaging a chatbot development company reduces upfront costs.

Integrations

If the chatbot needs to integrate with existing systems like customer databases, knowledge bases, calendars, etc., integration costs can add up quickly.

Training data for generative chatbots

The volume, quality, and complexity of training data required to achieve the desired conversational abilities directly impact costs.

Voice/multi-modal Interfaces

Adding voice interfaces, multi-lingual support, or advanced multi-modal capabilities increases development complexity and costs.

Conclusion

Chatbots have become a pivotal element of every business process today. And this has led to the advancement in numerous technologies racing to elevate the level of chatbots. The examples of ChatGPT and Google Bard are clear proof that the chatbot industry has witnessed a paradigm shift. In a scenario like this, for businesses that are still following primitive practices to serve their customers, it is time to invest in an AI chatbot.

Are you a business owner looking for an AI chatbot to streamline operations, boost sales, and enhance customer experience?

Book Your Free 45-Minute Consultation with Our AI Experts Today!

During this personalized consultation, our team will provide:

•  High-impact chatbot use cases for your business

• Guidance on design, build, and deploy a chatbot solution

• Roadmap to integrate chatbots into your existing systems