Best Features in chatbots

Chatbots is the latest buzz word in the world of mobile app development. But what are chatbots really? Chabot is a computer program designed to simulate conversations with humans, especially over the Internet. If you think chatbots are new technology, you may be wrong. In 1966, at MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Chatbot Eliza was built by Joseph Weizenbaum that could indulge in human conversations. Modelled after a Rogerian psychotherapist, Eliza worked by simple parsing and provided a parody of a conversation with a psychiatrist in the initial few minutes of the meeting.  

As per the stats, with chatbot market valued at $113 million in 2017, and a predicted growth prospects to reach $994.5 million by 2024, we can say that chatbots are all set to grow. That’s partly because people are relying more and more on messaging apps, like Facebook Messenger, Slack and Telegram etc.  To sum it up, the tech-scenario is developing day by day, making chatbots an effective customer interaction tool, with following features on board:

Conversation Breaks:

Considering conversation breaks would be a smart thing to do when you are making a chatbot. Chatbots shall always be there to help, but must know when to leave. In-chat suggestions and suggestions based on what is there on user’s screen is a smart feature, but placing suggestions on each and everything is not. The chatbot must be intelligent enough to read users’ search history and search pattern in order to come up with suggestions. 

Payment plugin:

The core purpose of a chatbot is to avail convenience for its customers. Also, chatbots have 24x7 connectivity, are intelligent, and can easily be linked to allied services such as electronic payments on mobile platforms. And not just that, a chatbot can be augmented to draw a preview of e-commerce products and can allow direct purchase of the product from the chat window itself. Many chatbot mobile app developers have already created chatbot applications that draw feed from other apps from different categories such as weather, share market, news and more. So, fetching feed from e-commerce applications and mirroring their payment channels on the chatbot shouldn’t be a hard nut to crack.  

Exit button:

Sometimes people would not need chatbot, and would like to chat without any suggestions. And for the sake of user experience, you shall provide them with an ‘exit’ button that shuts the chatbot down when the user chooses to. Moreover, it shall be a toggle button that also allows the user to boot the chatbot up whenever they want.  

Social media integration: 

With the tremendous advancements we have witnessed in social media in the last few years, it is apparent that social media platforms can allow a user to do a lot. While social media on its own is quite sufficient in itself, using the chatbot to allow people to check or post to their social media accounts, or even extract a particular piece of info from the platform would be making a good use of it.  

Analytics:

You are probably struggling with your business if you don`t have an overview of your analytics in real time. Chatbots are able to run analytics for your business in real time, which will provide you with insights on your business, sorted by location, age, gender etc. You can also analyse the data produced via chatbots to gain leads and get in touch with prospective customers.

Natural Language Processing:

NLP is a software that doesn’t look for keywords in your text like search engines do, rather it uses knowledge of sentence structure, idioms, and machine learning patterns to match what you say to an “intent”, and which has been “classified”, which means the bot has been programmed to identify certain things people want from it, and act upon them. 

The potential of chatbots have recently been identified by the world of technology, as we have seen chatbot being used in activities more than just automated chats, some of which are conversation-based suggestions, media suggestions, online product overview and much more. In future, we can expect chatbots in much more complex operations such as direct online purchases, intelligent buying suggestions, and more.