Chatbots have evolved significantly during the past year and it looks very likely that 2018 is going to produce a phenomenal number of new applications. Bots are contributing to businesses of all kinds, from customer service, marketing, and sales. Aside from proving to be a hugely valuable return on investment, they're now allowing companies across the world to automate their processes, streamline their operations for increased efficiency and produce much higher conversion rates and by default exaggerated ROI's.
Chatbots didn't start out as intelligent as they are today. Historically, the chatbot was bulky, inefficient and drove customers mad rather than helping them. Fortunately, the artificial intelligence (AI) that powers them has allowed them to evolve without too much time or monetary investment from the brands implementing them into their business strategies. However, despite AI (2018) being years ahead of their predecessors, there are still some simple rules you need to follow if you're wanting to create an effective chatbot for your brand.
The advancements in Chat Bot technology is not going to slow down anytime soon, and with an increasing number of Bots coming to market, prices will inevitably drop and the functionality of Bots will continue to provide increasing functionality . With that in mind, don't wait to reap the benefits from these phenomenal tools. While we may be a couple of years away from mainstream adoption, our recommendation is get involved now, start experimenting, learning, testing and watch how others are delivering Bot technologies within their businesses. If you do, you'll be at the forefront of your niche!
If costs and investment are an issue at this stage in your business, our recommendation is to take a look at Facebook Messenger’s official page. You can start building your own bot almost directly through the platform’s landing page.
While the FB Messenger Bot App may be a little bit more complicated than some of the new technologies, there are a lot of resources that Facebook provides to help you accomplish your goals, you could become to be a Chat Bot professional in no time.
As we mentioned above, Bot technologies are coming online so quickly that I feel by the time I finish this page, the offerings that are currently perceived to be some of the best, will be outdated.
At the time of writing this, Entrepreneur magazine suggests that the top ten Bots for 2018 are;
Chatty People
ChattyPeople is regarded as the best chatbot platform for creating an AI chatbot on for enterprise chatbot solutions with integrated Facebook commerce and many other solutions. With ChattyPeople you can create a message both quickly and easily, no coding required. The platform’s simplicity makes it ideal for entrepreneurs and marketers, you can make a simple bot answering customer service questions or integrate it with Shopify to monetize your Facebook fan pages. And the best bit is ChattyPeople is 100% free to get started.
Me Okay
The Me Okay call to action states, "Put our Team of Experts to Work for You Because our team of experts intimately understands your business, we designed our product specifically for you. We believe in having a good time while doing what we love." You can make an emotional connection by customizing your discussion and we love what we do!
Smooch
Build and manage every aspect of customer conversations on web, mobile, SMS or in social messaging apps. Save the heavy lifting but keep full control with powerful API modules and extensions to implement any conversational use case. Benefit from rich message types, channel abstractions, regular feature updates and delivery issues handled for you.
In the Free version, you can send 500 messages a month
Botsify
This is one of my personal favorites and also used and endorsed by Apple. Botsify has lots of integration options and a Human intervention element that can takeover the chat from chatbot anytime because they know chatbot isn't 100% accurate today.
Chat Fuel
Chatfuel was born in the summer of 2015 with the goal to make bot-building easy for anyone. They started on Telegram and quickly grew to millions of users. Today they're focusing mainly on making it easy for everyone to build chatbots on Facebook Messenger, where users currently include NFL and NBA teams, publishers like TechCrunch and Forbes, and millions of others.
They believe in the power of chatbots to strengthen your connection to your audience—whether that's your customers, readers, fans, or others. And we're committed to making that as easy as we can.
Telegram Bots
This is a great platform to get started as Telegram is free forever. No ads. No subscription fees. You can coordinate
groups of up to 50000 members, synchronize chats across all your devices and platforms and send documents of any type. There are many more benefits to the newbie Bot Chat entrepreneur but the Free element is what we liked most.
Bot Kit
The leading developer tool for building chat bots, apps and custom integrations for major messaging platforms. Battle tested code, in use by 10,000's of bots right now. Visual conversation builder, Built-in stats and metrics with powerful Open Source libraries and more than 40 plugins.
Flow XO
Another favorite of the Secret Breaker team. The Flow XO call to action is to 'Be wherever your customers want to find you.'
It is both automated or human, you can talk directly to your customers through your chatbot. Plugs into email or your helpdesk software. And it's ready for business.
Messaging has to be fast and reliable, always.That's why their technology platform is built for scale and reliability. It's also easy (point & click). You only need to build once to be on all the platforms that Flow XO support, and of course, FaceBook.
We have provided click through branded images in the column to the left in order for you to do you own evaluations.
