Overview of ChatBots
'According to Ghose and Barua (2013), students often prefer the interaction with chatbots, even when the information is available on the web' (Moraes & Machado, 2016).
'Recently, chatbots have been used in various fields. In education, they are often used in tutoring systems, question-answer and others learning system to stimulate thinking and metacognitive ability of students. They also act as pedagogical agents and partners in the learning process (Kerly et al, 2009; Griol et al 2011)' (as cited in Moraes & Machado, 2016).
'The chatbots provide a more natural and practical interface to the student. They are able to offer a personal support, to recognize the strengths and abilities of students. In addition, they can also accelerate the learning to act as instigators of study topics, resulting in more engaged and independent learners (Kerly et al, 2009; Griol et al 2011; Moreno et al, 2015; Ramayana and Netto, 2014)' (as cited in Moraes & Machado, 2016).
Reference
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Moraes, S.M., & Machado, R.M. (2016). Chatterbot for Education : a Study based on Formal Concept Analysis for Instructional Material Recommendation. DOI: 10.5753/cbie.sbie.2016.1347
ChatBots in Business
Companies across industries find the potential of Chatbots attractive. CCW Digital’s Fall Executive Report reveals that 80% of organizations call artificial intelligence “important.” (Cantor, 2017)
1) Chatbots are automation systems. Your business can save on operational costs for employees who are assigned to simple administrative tasks.Chatbots offer customers speeder support at a lower rate for companies.
2) Chatbots help businesses efficiently accomplish tasks that would have otherwise required human labor. This is important because businesses are always looking to cut costs without sacrificing service or product quality.
According to one report, Chatbots currently account for business cost savings of $20 million globally (Gilchrist, 2017). And, that number is expected to rise. Findings from analysis firm Juniper Research show that Chatbots are expected to trim business costs by more than $8 billion per year by 2022 (Gilchrist, 2017). Chatbots can also help companies save long-term by putting them ahead of the competition. According to an Oracle survey, 80% of large businesses plan on using Chatbots by 2020 (Business Insider, 2016).
For a business to create a simpler chatbot, with a bot that could understand 5-10 questions, you’d be able to design a chatbot between 50-100 hours, or have one created from between 3-5k USD. If you were an Entrepreneur with a small business today, the practicality and cost savings from a basic chatbot would outright lead you to choose (at the very least consider) a chatbot over hiring an employee for the same purpose. This also holds true to a larger company who would need a more complex Chatbot built, the cost to design the chatbot would be more, but the savings in operational costs in the long run would be more attractive.
This opens up the reality that business makes the world go round, and that as long as someone or something is more effective for the business, we will take it. 24/7 response, no sick days or vacation days, and no payroll are what makes a Chatbot far more compelling than human labour.
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References:
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Cantor, B. (October 16, 2017). Chatbots. CCW Digital:Special Report Series. Retrieved from https://ccwexchangeusa.iqpc.com/downloads/ccw-digital-special-report-chatbot?-ty-m
Gilchrist, K. (2017, May 9). Chatbots expected to cut business cost by $8 billion by 2022. CNBC. Retrieved from https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/09/chatbots-expected-to-cut-business-costs-by-8-billion-by-2022.html
Steele, I. (2018, Feb 20). “It’s All About The $$$ - How Much Money Can Chatbots Save?”. Comm100. Retrieved from https://www.comm100.com/blog/how-much-can-chatbots-actually-save-you.html.
TARS
Founded in 2015 by Vinit Agrawal and Ish Jindal, TARS enables individuals and businesses to create chatbots that can be used on your website and Facebook Messenger with no programming knowledge at all. The chatbots created via TARS can be used for ordering/booking process, feedback collection, conducting surveys, user onboarding, training, customer support automation, and a lot more.
TARS Pricing Plans
TARS doesn’t offer a free plan, but you can sign up for a 14-day free trial to create a bot and test out some of the bot-building features.
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Standard – $49/month (includes 5 chatbots, 500 chats/month)
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Premium – $129/month (includes 10 chatbots, 1000 chats/month)
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Enterprise – Custom (includes 20+ chatbots, 10,000 chats/month)
Botsify
Botsify lets you create AI chatbots on your website or Facebook messenger without any coding knowledge. Botsify is integrated with several services, including WordPress, Shopify, Slack, Alexa, Google Sheets, RSS Feed, JSON API, ZenDesk. The easy-to-use drag and drop interface helps you with template design for your chatbot. Lots of big brands use Botsify to design their chatbots, including Apple and Shazam.
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Botsify Pricing Plans
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Free – $0/month (1 chatbot, 100 unique users)
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Basic – $10/month (3 chatbots, 1,000 unique users)
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Premium – $30/month (5 chatbots, 5,000 unique users)
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Enterprise – $50/month (100 chatbots, 50,000 unique users)
Chatfuel
Chatfuel is a free bot-building platform that lets you create chatbots on FB messenger and Telegram with no prior coding experience required. Chatfuel is currently being used by NFL and NBA teams, and publishers like TechCrunch and Forbes.
Chatfuel Pricing Plans
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Free – $0/month
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Pro – $30/month
The main feature of the Pro Plan at this time is the ability to remove Chatfuel’s branding from your bot’s menu. Also available is the ‘People’ tab, which gives you more flexibility in managing your bot’s audience. Pro users also enjoy prioritized email support.
FlowXO
Flow XO is a chatbot platform that allows you to build and distribute smart chatbots on Facebook and your website. The platform provides lots of pre-built chatbot templates which you can customize easily with the drag and drop editor.
Flow XO Pricing Plans
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Free Plan – $0/month (5 bots and 500 interactions)
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Standard Plan – $19/month (15 bots and 5000 interactions)
Four Major ChatBot Creation Companies
To create their ChatBots, Evan and Aggie used DialogFlow.
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Why Use It?
Powered by Google's machine learning and built on Google Infrastructure. Dialogflow incorporates Google's machine learning expertise and products such as Google Cloud Speech-to-Text. Dialogflow is backed by Google and runs on Google Cloud Platform, letting you scale to hundreds of millions of users.
Dialogflow comes in 2 editions: Standard Edition is free and covers the need of most developers, while Enterprise Edition offers paid enterprise support. You can choose which edition to use when you create your Dialogflow agent. Your account can include agents from both editions.
Fulfillment is code that's deployed as a webhook that lets your Dialogflow agent call business logic on an intent-by-intent basis. Most Dialogflow agents make use of fulfillment. The following are some example cases where you can use fulfillment to extend an agent:
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To generate dynamic responses based on information looked up from a database.
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To place orders based on products a customer has asked for.
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To implement the rules and winning conditions for a game.
How has DialogFlow been implemented in businesses? See the case studies below.
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Domino’s Pizza DialogFlow CaseStudy- https://dialogflow.com/case-studies/dominos/Domino's-case-study.pdf
TicketMaster DialogFlow Case Study-
https://dialogflow.com/case-studies/ticketmaster/ticketmaster-case-study.pdf
To create her ChatBot and the LaunchPad ChatBot, Kate used FlowXO.
When FlowXO was a small startup in a small UK town, their initial intention was to help businesses connect with customers through ChatBots; their platform enables people with no knowledge of coding to create a bot.
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Though founder John Jackson never liked the 'hype' around ChatBots: 'all the talk was about chatbots acting like super-intelligent humans, answering any question or fixing whatever issue a person brought to it. That was always a pipe dream.' He sees the future of ChatBots being a mix between email and social, driven by the question 'how do customers benefit from ChatBots?' These ideas would certainly make sense for instructors looking to cut down on the one-to-one nature of email while avoiding the open, unlimited world of social media.