An artificial intelligence course can show you the way to a promising career in the field. AI is everywhere today. From healthcare to retail businesses and the finance industry, almost every company is using AI techniques to promote automation and improve the overall efficiency of their businesses. One of the many common applications of artificial intelligence is a chatbot or a virtual assistant. The way a chatbot understands human language and responds to it is amazing.

Many online businesses are adding chatbots to their websites to provide 24*7 support to their customers. To make these bots work so smoothly, software developers have to go through a challenging process. If you want to become a chatbot developer or just trying to build a chatbot for your website, you need to understand the basics first.

You can enroll in an artificial intelligence course to learn all the important AI algorithms and gain practical experience. For now, let us help you understand what a chatbot is and how you can build it:

What is a Chatbot?

A chatbot is a software device that aims to mimic the way humans converse through voice or text interactions. It uses NLP (Natural Language Processing) and AI (Artificial Intelligence) to understand the questions asked to them and automate responses. Chatbots can understand and process human language to interact with humans while performing certain tasks at the same time. They are also called virtual assistants or virtual agents.

Many businesses use AI-powered chatbots as their customer care representatives. These chatbots can interact with their customers and help them by answering their queries. Customers can even ask follow-up questions to get more clear responses. Not only this, but chatbots can even perform specific tasks. Here are some most common examples of tasks that AI chatbots can perform for humans:

• Setting reminders to do specific tasks based on time
• Finding local restaurants around you and providing directions for the same
• Defining the fields within financial application forms
• Updating about real-time weather conditions

Types of Chatbots

Based on the way of conversation, AI chatbots can be classified into the following types:

• Text-based Chatbots: These chatbots answer your questions in the form of text.
• Voice-based Chatbots: These chatbots answer your questions in the form of a human-like voice.

Points to Consider While Building an AI Chatbot

Having AI chatbots on your website can have many advantages. They interact with your customers and provide them with quick responses, which improves your customer’s experiences with your website. Moreover, these chatbots can perform several small tasks, reducing the need to hire human employees.

Building an AI chatbot is challenging. Along with the hassle of coding, you need to keep a lot of things in mind. From deciding on the type of chatbot and its purpose to designing the conversation in the right manner, there are a lot of important things you have to take care of. You will need to follow the below-mentioned steps to build an AI chatbot:

1. 1. Decide What Purpose The Chatbot Should Serve
Your first step towards building a chatbot should be to give it a purpose. Decide what functions you want the chatbot to perform. You can use it as a customer care executive, a virtual receptionist, a virtual driving assistant, a home assistant, an entertainment assistant, or several other purposes. Based on your business type and customer requirements, you can find out what features you should add to your chatbot.


2. 2. Choose Where To Implement Your Chatbot
Now, you have to decide where your chatbot is going to be. You can implement it on your website, app, social media channels, or any other messaging platform. Try to identify which platform is most suitable for your target audience and decide the right place for your chatbot accordingly. Some chatbot development platforms even allow you to use your chatbot across multiple channels. You can consider this option if you want to automate communication across all your channels.


3. 3. Choose the Right Framework
In the next step, you need to choose the right tech platform or framework to build your chatbot. You can opt for AI frameworks, like IBM Watson, MS Bot, Dialogflow, etc, which act as libraries and are used to code chatbots. Another option is to go with platforms that allow you to build chatbots with minimal or no coding. Though building a chatbot using bot platforms is cheaper, these bots have limited functionality. On the other hand, frameworks allow you to build chatbots from scratch and design them exactly the way you want.


4. 4. Design The Conversation
After building the chatbot, you need to teach it how to converse with your customers. The easiest way to build the conversational flow and create a sequence is by dragging and dropping the building blocks. Make sure to take your brand tone into consideration. You can start by teaching your bot to send a welcome message as soon as a customer logs in. Now, set messages for the customers who are looking for discounts and who are not.


5. 5. Train and Test the Chatbot
Building an AI chatbot and teaching it the conversation is not enough. You also need to ensure that everything works in the right way. If your chatbot is based on a simple decision tree flow, you can just add it to your website as it doesn’t require further testing. However, if you want the chatbot to understand your customer’s intentions, you will have to add an NLP trigger to it. After launching the chatbot, ask for feedback from your customers and try to improve it.

Also Read: Are we really using Artificial Intelligence in our daily lives?

The architecture of Artificial Intelligence chatbots should consist of the following components:

Chatbot Window: It is the window where the entire conversation takes place. The chat window should not break or close until the user asks to quit the conversation.
Deep Learning Model for NLP: A chatbot is based on a deep learning model for NLP, which enables it to understand human language and reply in the same medium (text or speech).
Corpus or Training Data: Corpus or training data refers to the data that you use to train the NLP model to understand human language in the form of speech or text. It can be designed manually or can accumulate over time in an organized manner. The components of a corpus include an input pattern, output pattern, and tag.
Application Database: These are the databases used in processing the actions that the chatbot needs to perform.

Here are some additional tips that might help you build an amazing chatbot:

• Consider your brand tone and try to give a human touch to your chatbot. The chatbot should sound friendly and interesting to keep your customers engaged.
• Transfer complex problems to human support representatives. Your customers might get frustrated when the chatbot can’t solve complex issues and keep repeating itself.
• Design your chatbot’s conversation in such a way that it breaks answers into quick replies and responds at a realistic speed.

To build an artificial intelligence chatbot, it is important to understand the basics of AI. The Artificial Intelligence courses by Edvancer help you learn AI from the basic to the advanced level. Edvancer offers the following three courses in AI:

• Certified Artificial Intelligence Specialist
• IIT Kanpur Advanced Certification in AI and Machine Learning
• IBM Professional Certificate in AI and Machine Learning

With these courses, you get 360-degree coverage of all the important AI topics. Along with this, Edvancer’s courses allow you to gain practical knowledge by working on assignments and real industry projects. You can even choose to learn as per your comfort as the platform provides you with two learning options, which include self-paced learning and live online classes.

1. What is the future of AI-based chatbots?
Ans. The global chatbot market is expected to reach $27,297.2 million by 2030, which is evidence of the immense upcoming growth in AI chatbots. In the upcoming years, you can expect AI chatbots with more advanced features and even better functionality.

2. What programming language is required for an AI chatbot??
Ans. Python, Java, and R programming are the top coding languages that are used to build AI chatbots.

3. Does the chatbot use AI or ML??
Ans. Chatbots use Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing (a part of Machine learning) to understand human languages and reply to them with accuracy.

4. Which algorithm is used for the chatbot system??
Ans. Some popular algorithms used to build AI chatbots include Natural Language Processing, Naive Bayes, and Support Vector Machine.