Chatbots have grown as the preferred tool for online user interaction. Businesses are using it for customer service, marketing, and others. Despite these advantages, startup owners are still having doubts about the chatbot development process. This article discusses how it works and helps startups find chatbot developers.

Chatbot services are not new applications and have been around for a long time. Its unprecedented growth over the past years is the manifestation that the market is benefiting from it.

Business organizations are leveraging this technology. The IT world is expecting chatbot’s market worth to be $1.25B by 2025. Unfortunately, many startups are yet to embrace its use. The primary reason is the complexity of chatbot development and the scarcity of developers.

All startup owners want to build a chatbot application having all the attributes to succeed. But they are facing difficulty with the process, selecting the right chatbot development tools, and others.

Let’s examine why.

What is a Chatbot Development?

Integrating chatbot services into a business is a multi-faceted journey. There is no single approach or tool to make it happen. Instead, it takes a wide range of technologies and strategies to build a successful chatbot application.

Plus, it is never-ending. Building a chatbot application is similar to teaching a child how to talk and respond. Every time you add services and products to your business, you also teach your chatbots additional features.

Thus, the growth of your business is parallel to the growth of your chatbot application.

Here are the steps to get you started:

1. Determine the role of the bot and its goal
2. Evaluate and pick a channel
3. Develop the conversational architecture
4. Design dialog flows and storyboards
5. Design the integrations
6. Collect chat data
7. Pick a platform and development approach
8. Implement dialogue flow
9. Engineer Natural Language Processing(NLP)
10. Engineer Natural Language Understanding(NLU)
11. Test and revise NLU components
12. Deploy your chatbot application

These are not exhaustive steps but they will help you with the planning and workaround of your chatbot development.

Remember to establish a modest goal that matches your business philosophy. And, as the business owner, allow yourself to learn the process as you train your conversational applications to evolve.

Just like teaching a child, it will take time and tons of effort.

For additional information, check out the details of chatbot development through this complete guide on chatbots.

Programming languages used in chatbot development

Knowing the chatbot development process is one thing; the programming languages to use is another. As chatbots continue to help digitization in customer service and marketing, it lures startups to start building one.

Since you already have an overview of the chatbot development process, The next step is to know which programming language to use.

Here are five programming languages that you can use to develop chatbots:

Python

This programming language is one of the most widely used languages in the field of Artificial Intelligence(AI). Since chatbots are AI-fueled applications, most of these applications use Python programming language. It is simple, straightforward, and uses Artificial Intelligence Markup Language(AIML) for creating natural language software agents.

Clojure

If you are interested in functional programming, then Clojure will help you with chatbot development. It is a dialect from the Lisp programming language which runs on Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Since it is a functional language, it offers recursion and high-order functions.

PHP

If you are on a tight budget, then PHP is best for your chatbot development. It is an open-source language and is much faster than other scripting languages. It has huge libraries to call and is platform-independent.

Java

The high-level features of Java are ideal for AI projects. Thus, it is suitable for chatbot development because of its easy way of coding algorithms. It allows your application to run on any platform.

Ruby

This dynamic and object-oriented programming language has a very simple syntax. Keep in mind that it has expression in almost every line of code and offers imperative execution.

Aside from programming languages, you will need other chatbot development tools, such as frameworks.

Chatbot development frameworks

Developers use frameworks for faster development. It includes a set of pre-defined functions and classes to build bots from scratch. These chatbot development frameworks integrate with the preferred programming language.

Here are four examples:

• Microsoft Bot Framework – This development framework consists of chatbot development tools and components such as Bot Directory, Developer Portal, and Bot Builder SDK.
• Facebook Bot Engine (Wit.ai) – It helps developers in extracting predefined entities such as date, time, etc.
• API.ai – It provides SDKs and libraries for Android, iOS, Webkit HTML5, JavaScript, Node.js, and others.
• Aspect CXP and Aspect NLU – Developers use Aspect CXP in designing, implementing, and deploying multi-channel customer service applications. Aspect NLU is its sub-component, it is responsible for providing human-like interactions.

Learning about the process and the technologies associated with it is a great start. As mentioned earlier, this development is not the same as traditional software development.

Let’s consider additional approaches from a business owner’s perspective.

The chatbot development mantra

According to IBRS, chatbot development often fails because owners treat it as a traditional software project. Interestingly, building chatbots have no project sign-offs. It keeps on looping to achieve its goal.

Here are three mantras from IBRS to consider in chatbot development.

Experimental

You initiate chatbot development as an experiment. It aims for success, but stakeholders are aware that along the way, it may fail. These failures are considered discoveries. And these discoveries will be transforming the future efforts of the development.

Experiential

This approach involves direct collaboration between developers and potential users. The chatbot development is on-going, but it allows users internal exposure to the development, training, and refinement of chatbots. The users’ feedback helps the improvement of the development.

Iterative

Chatbot development by theory and practice is iterative. In our example, we are teaching children how to talk and respond. Thus, as the businesses grow and add services, the chatbots continue to evolve as well.

Start your Chatbot Development Today

The future of chatbots is immense. Right now, we are using chatbots as assistants, salespeople, marketers, and others. Soon after, we will be dealing with multi-lingual chatbots. This is the power of artificial intelligence.

Yes, the digital transformation is fast and sometimes can be overwhelming. However, with chatbot development, the main idea is to start and build.

Full Scale is a great choice for building chatbots. To scale your business, deploy a chatbot today. We can help you build your chatbots easily and affordably.

Our expert developers in Python, PHP, Java, Ruby languages, and AI and machine learning are willing to help you. We give you a FREE consultation to kickstart your chatbot services integration. Let’s talk.