Disclaimer-mark
This is a user generated content for MyStory, a YourStory initiative to enable its community to contribute and have their voices heard. The views and writings here reflect that of the author and not of YourStory.
Disclaimer-mystory

How To Make An Intelligent Chatbot For Your Business?

Step-By-Step Guide For Making Intelligent Chatbot

How To Make An Intelligent Chatbot For Your Business?

Monday May 13, 2019,

15 min Read

What Is Intelligent Chatbot?

All bots that are talking through a messenger to a machine algorithm and giving responses are not intelligent Chatbots.


It is because it fulfills the goal by responding as per the fed input based on some logic.


Many Chatbots used in different fields that achieve their goals are not using sophisticated intelligence. And they are not far along the conversation axis.


Some Definitions for Today's Intelligent Chatbots


  • A fabulously designed conversational interface that is easy and seamless to use.
  • It could be of natural language processing and able to understand sentences with the wrong way of structuring.
  • Bots able to reply even ‘off-topic' questions smartly
  • Bots with memory and ability to identify the caller and respond accordingly.
  • Bots along with memory learn and evolve over-time.
  • Bots that provide adequate and relevant information to achieve the goal response even to a simple query.


How to Make an Intelligent Chatbot?


Chatbots are useful business catalysts in this highly smart communicative world. With tons of Chatbots available it is not an easy task to make intelligent Chatbots. It is a school of thought with a lot of thought and action processes. It involves a lot of functionality and features to create the right and intelligent Chatbot as per the need of the business.


The Following Five Steps Have to Be First Decided to Develop Chatbots


1. Objective

The first thing is to identify the issue that the Chatbot is going to solve in the business functions. You should read the In-Depth Guide Of Chatbot. It will help you in this regard.

2. Functionality

It is essential to decide what the idea the bot is to function and achieve its goal. It is necessary to be clear of what it can do and what it cannot do. Also, it is pertinent to decide the two perspectives of one or another type of functionality and features.


3. Technology

It is a vital part of making the Chatbot intelligent. It takes care of where the bot lives and on what is the basis of its making. The right platform and the processing mechanism decides here.


There are a lot of platforms and frameworks to choose to build intelligent Chatbots. Also, there are many services to select to make intelligent Chatbots even without AI knowledge.


4. Audience

Like websites, intelligent Chatbot should cater to the needs of the target audience. It involves tone of voice, interface design or message length. It is only from where and when the target audience will determine the composition of the intelligent Chatbot.

5. Channel

It is only the channel that determines the usage of the interface, what kind of audience and from when and where they would function and many more.


Features and Functionalities for Making an Intelligent Chatbot


1. Intelligent Platform Chatbots

Today may successful Chatbots are on intelligent platforms. Some successful examples include X ai, Google Assistant and many more. In this case, the platform becomes a smart agent. The Chatbot becomes a sensor of it to perform the instructions given by the platform. The performance is after analyzing the collected and stored information.

The intelligent platform works to find the goal by converting the stored information into a form for humans to understand. Hence the challenge is not about making the Chatbot capable but the platform intelligent. So the focus is now on ways to define the goal and infuse the sense-thing-act capability into the platform.


2. Chatbots Should Know What the User Wants

A Chatbot is only intelligent if it is aware of what the user wants. It needs to be quick and smart enough to understand the context of the real-time conversation. Usually, human discussions are replete with many instances of switching over the meaning and in the end, it is all about sense and sensibility.

Human conversations tend to switch between contexts or intents and variables or entities. It happens while at work or talking, resuming a task, discarding a current job to new ones. In general, it is to hold a task while another task is being executed, worked and followed.


Read also : Why Integration Of Chatbots With SharePoint Is Beneficial


3. Samples of Multiple or Complex Conversations

For a flight booking bot ‘My destination? LA.' It is fine till here but when the user immediately asks ‘What is the weather condition over there?. Now it becomes complex for the Chatbot to search an answer for the first one or the second one. To give a befitting reply to this kind of language nuances the need for an intelligent Chatbot is crucial.

For this, there are two ways the intelligent Chatbots to understand the users' requirements. The first one is the limited Chatbots way with a limited set of guidelines. And its internal structuring applies to the way the Chatbot should respond without any real-time responses from the interactive agent.

The second one could give real-time responses to the users' requirements based on endless conversations and increased learning. But it is still in the evolving process due to its complexity. But with applications like Alexa, Google, Assistant, and others are on the pathway towards dynamic real-time responses.


To Cut Complexity Intelligent Chatbots Need:


  • Ignoring the proactive user queries by localizing them.
  • Enable the Chatbot to increase the capability of sensing natural language utterances.
  • To have abilities of context switching to handle interruptions intelligently.
  • To provide full control to developers in defining the experience.
  • Capture and keep accessible the unattended interruptions from a conversation.
  • Equipped with human conversations.
  • Ability to hold and resume dialogs for a particular amount of time.
  • Execute tasks in sequential order.


In the future, the intelligent Chatbots will know what the user wants even before asking them. NLP incorporated into Chatbots do smart tasks by many useful tools available now. It includes IBM Watson, API ai, Wit ai and many others.


4. Chatbots Should Complete the Users' Request

Chatbots are primarily developed to meet and serve user requests. It is done with suitable and relevant responses with proper planning to perform the task requested by the user.


Mapping the user request to the best intelligent response is one of the significant challenges to convince the user. These challenges are in the following ways:


  • By learning from the conversation responds to all user requests.
  • Plans accordingly from one user request to another until the completion of the task.
  • Planning by identifying the sequence of actions to do the primary goal of the user.
  • Intelligent planning with the help of ANN or artificial neural network aid.
  • Applies heuristics methods for immediate action to progress from one request to another for the best response.
  • To form structured responses it performs intelligence building.
  • Use the memory of the past experiences to give the appropriate response to complex tasks.
  • To get accurate business user responses, it maps all the user requests and stores them in the user repository.
  • Keywords help in creating thoughtful responses.
  • Gets continuously smarter with every conversation.


5. Make Chatbot a Learning Champion

For intelligent Chatbots, learning becomes a distinguishing trait of the Chatbot. Uninterrupted and undisturbed continuous learning from the conversations improves Chatbots performance.


User modeling modules and NLU modules of Chatbots can perform this continuous learning better to recognize patterns to respond appropriately.


Machine Learning algorithms and techniques ensure AI Chatbots become a good learner. The methods include reinforcement learning both supervised and unsupervised.


Even with neural networks and deep learning make Chatbots not only good learners but great champions of education.


6. Expectations of Intelligent Chatbot Functions

Both helpers and collectors need to be infused with intelligent quotient to become knowledgeable. Comparatively, helpers are more intelligent than collectors.


They could help users to buy better products, book rooms and buy cars. NLP and proper understanding power the recognition.


A collector becomes intelligent by appropriately presenting the collected information.


Making the Chatbot more responsive is another way of infusing intelligence to them. But it depends on the purpose of the Chatbot.


In the case of collectors, it is a predefined set of queries the responses via text and voice that adhered to a business model. When the responsiveness is real-time, it is intelligent helper Chatbots.


7. Ideal Intelligent Chatbot Model

Comparatively generative models are better intelligent than retrieval based models. Generative models use translational machine techniques to generate new responses. It enhances extended conversations when Chatbot deals with several user queries.


Deep learning techniques benefit both generative and retrieval based models. But generative models have more power than the retrieval based models. It is because they work on the concept of predefined response.


8. Factors That Make Chatbot Intelligent

  • Autonomously working Chatbots assess problems and provide smart solutions. The following are the steps that determine to learn Chatbots to become intelligent.
  • First and foremost the Chatbot should identify the goal as per the specific simulate crystal.
  • To find the possibility of realizing the goal, it should process the available information which involves sensing the simulation.
  • Accordingly, it has to go on a recursive or repetitive mode to confirm the realization of a goal is possible or not. Environment based thinking and making decisions makes it possible.
  • It enhances the conversion of requests to a machine-understandable form of parameter values. It makes it easy to retrieve them when required by storing them in an information base.
  • To increase the learning capacity, a system of continuous knowledge-building is only by the interactive mode. This knowledge helps Chatbots learn & respond fast to provide the most convincing reply.
  • A decision making caliber built with the help of ANN or artificial neural network for best responses.
  • It is followed by the acts to carry out the decisions.
  • Plans and helps Chatbots to learn the queries from the users' end. It helps to a certain level of predictive analysis with the increasing number of human interactions and questions. Stored in the information repository, it allows Chatbots to be intelligent.
  • To respond in real-time realistically, setting guidelines and machine learning help Chatbots.
  • The ultimate truth is a Chatbot is as intelligent as its programming code.
  • For relevant and realistic responses the codes should be flexible and intricate.


9. Correct Conversation Progress of Intelligent Chatbots

The open domain is the preferred choice for improving the conversations of Chatbots to make them intelligent. It does not limit communications to a single goal or intention. They can take off in different directions and topics, unlike domain specific or closed domain type.

Most of the social media conversations happen only in the accessible domain mode for far reach and variety of issues and topics. To bring in the fair quotient of humanlike emotions open domain is more preferred.


Domain-specific preferring by sales system support is because they want to limit outputs by providing limit inputs. Also, they are widely used to achieve specific goals.


10. Chatbot Challenges to Become Intelligent


"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."

– Martin Luther King Jr.


Without challenges, it is not possible to make an intelligent Chatbot. Only overcoming the problems could increase the qualities of smart Chatbots.


Context Integration

The holy grail of the Chatbots is sensible responses. Just physical and linguistic contexts help to achieve practical answers.


Context integration though complex and challenging to get it into the intelligence system is worth its value. Context integration redefines the interactions of Chatbots.  

 

Embedding conversations in the vector format in programming is an uphill task. It needs the following:

  • Timestamp
  • Contextual data
  • Date and location details about the users to integrate with a Chatbot


Coherent Responses

It is incorporating consistent responses in Chatbots powers them to answer consistently to semantically similar inputs. An example of this is the following two questions which are semantically identical but in different word formats.

"What is your name."

"What can I call You."

The answer or the response of Chatbot is the same for the above two semantically similar questions. But for the Chatbots to understand the usage of queries needs coherent responses. Programming efforts to achieve coherence is not an easy job.  The simplest way is to train the Chatbots to produce semantically correct answers.


Performance or Model Assessment

Whatever measured grows may be an old saying, but it needed more in this digital business world. But in the case of Chatbots measuring performance becomes difficult with more reliance on human judgments. But to assess the performance of the closed domain model, it is comfortable with limited inputs and outputs along with specific goals.

But in the case of the open domain, it is one of the biggest challenges. It is because it is not limited and can prolong conversations in different directions and topics also because they are dynamic and at the moment based on real-time intelligence and information mining.


Read Intention Training

With read intention training of Chatbots, the companies can increase customer retention and better business activities. It is mostly possible with generative Chatbots that provide generic responses for several user inputs.


The training of the Chatbots determines the ability to produce relevant answers. Without retention training, the diversity required for handling multiple scenarios based questions is not possible.


Also read : How Chatbots Have Become Your Teachers In Education?


NLP or CI for Intelligent Chatbot


With the advantages of both natural language processing and conversational interfaces, it is a tough task to choose one of the two. Both are like two eyes to an intelligent Chatbot. But if at all left with no option to choose between the two the following factors will help:


NLP

NLP is there for generations now. From the time of Turing in 1950, it has evolved I over the decades. It was machine learning after three decades, and now it has changed to in-depth knowledge for the past decade. The slow but steady evolution of NLP is phenomenal and could go only one way in the future.


NLP Based Chatbot Services responds by way of parsing language into intent, entities, agents, actions, and contexts. It aims to interpret, recognize and understand user requests in the form of free language. But on the negative side even after so many years, it is still having an average precision rate of 60 – 70 % which is not usable for some instances.


CI

CI combines a natural language interface with graphical user interface elements to act as a hybrid user interface. It includes buttons, images, menus, videos and many more. NLP focuses more on understanding, and the conversational interface focuses more on a personalized experience.


Furthermore, the next generation of conversational interaction is going to be conversational intelligence. Today's CI is more about user-initiated conversations or notifications about pre-programmed actions. Examples are the functions of Alex and Siri.

But in the case of conversational intelligence, it is going to be the ability of an interface. It enables us to know a user, learn and understand their moments, actions, behaviors and preferences. It will allow recommending, predict, and act on behalf of the user.


But before coming to a conclusion depending on the pros and cons of both NLP and CI, it is better to check specific scenarios. Any tool can be good or bad only by depending on the context of its usage. Hence the following situations will help decide which is better for intelligent Chatbots.


Companionship Chatbot

Since this relieves the pain of many lonely and older adults emotionally, it does not need much understanding skills. Hence NLP is the best choice for it.


Website Chatbot

CI by nature focuses more on user personalized experience or attention. It always offers only relevant information by customizing each user information. The companies optimize their full funnel conversions with their ability to qualify leads in real-time.


Customer Support Bot

It is one of the primary reasons for Chatbots. The urgency and specificity of a Chatbot that the users want to interact are its principal characteristics. Hence the ideal solution will be NLP even though due to its low average precision rates it may need human intervention sometimes.

In simple words, businesses need more of CI Chatbots for their better user experiences. Emotional and other specific goal related Chatbots need NLP. One more interesting fact is that at the customer journey as a funnel, NLP is more in demand in the later stages with CI more in the initial stages.


Conclusion

Nowadays when there is a lot of demand for Chatbot, it becomes vital for all business owners to be aware of Chatbot Development methods.


Taking this idea into consideration, here we have tried to provide you with an in-depth guide on making intelligent Chatbot which will help any Chatbot Development Agency.


If you’ve any questions or suggestions related to this blog, then feel free to ask them in our comment section. Thank You.!