A Guide to Chatbot Development by Kevin Rann

Mathew Allen
5 min readNov 14, 2021

Kevin Rann said in today’s cutthroat competitive business environment, where most companies have equally appealing products or services, business leaders unanimously agree that it’s that little personalized customer service or personalized marketing campaign that will make a difference and attract the customer to your business rather than to your competitors. You might be asking how this relates to Chatbot Development. Yes, please allow me to elaborate. Personalization is simple to perform manually while your company is small, but when your client base or target market niche grows, scaling becomes a major difficulty as claimed by Kevin Rann. Though genuine human involvement is still required if a discussion delves deeper into a topic, many of the early chats may be handled in a much-customized manner by a chatbot, which can then be effortlessly transferred to a human as the conversation progresses. As you can see, a chatbot may offer a significant amount of value to your client acquisition and retention processes. Let’s go through what a chatbot is, the many sorts of chatbots, and the technology that goes with them, and how to choose a business for your chatbot development project.

What exactly is a chatbot?

A chatbot is a conversation tool that is created based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) for the aim of conversing with humans. It is, as the name indicates, a technology that interacts with humans for a variety of objectives such as corporate advertising, automated customer service, management of internal company issues, and so on according to Kevin Rann. In summary, in today’s commercial environment, a chatbot is big communication technology. Now, you’ll know it’s a Chatbot chatting to you if you get a speedy yet professional response to your inquiry or request from a service provider. No wonder Chatbot is a cutting-edge AI idea, designed to give businesses a scalable and cost-effective means to communicate with clients in a more customized way, which was previously impossible without paying a fortune.

How do chatbots function?

Now that you’ve figured out what a Chatbot is, it’s time to figure out how it operates. Chatbots are based on the Natural Language Processing (NLP) process, which is explained below:

Step 1: Recognize natural language

The initial phase in Chatbot operation is Natural Language Understanding (NLU). It’s all about the machine deciphering human communication. The Chatbot receives a human text message and turns it into structured data that a machine can interpret as per Kevin Rann. This is how Chatbot deciphers what a user is requesting.

Step 2: Generating Natural Language

The second phase in Chatbot operation is Natural Language Generation (NLG). This stage involves turning the structured data into text that can be read by humans. In this stage, the Chatbot changes the reply message from structured data to text so that the user may get his or her response. Although the process ends at NLG, there is plenty to grasp between NLU and NLG, since Chatbot performs activities such as looking for an answer. Between NLU and NLG, there are five stages, as mentioned by Kevin Rann:

Tokenization: In this phase, the Chatbot divides the user’s phrase into tokens or words.

· Tagging: The words are labeled as nouns, adverbs, verbs, adjectives, and other figures of speech in this stage.

· Stemming: The term is then shortened to structured data by the Chatbot.

· Recognize entities: Chatbot looks for the object that a user has typed in the data.

· Recognizing emotions: Chatbot analyses the user’s thoughts and converts the structured data into a reply text on the user’s screen.

Chatbots’ Importance in Enterprise Business:

If you’ve been following Chatbot communications for a while and now have an idea for Chatbot development for your company, you’re on the right track. In today’s business, chatbots are game-changers. The ability to employ Chatbots for customer support is the most essential reason for their creation. Customer service is a new business marketing in today’s corporate world. Pleased consumers indeed attract business to you, regardless of what type of business you operate as per Kevin Rann. As a result, chatbots are increasingly being utilized for customer support, help, supply chain management (SCM), and customer relationship management (CRM), among other things. Customers love to have rapid service at their fingertips while relaxing on their comfortable couches. As a result, Chatbots may be used to help clients via messengers, and they can answer in a fraction of a second, which is far faster than human capabilities. Customer service that is quick, effective, and precise can build a business; consequently, chatbots have the potential to expand your company’s business. Consider the following scenario to show the value of a chatbot in your corporate firm. For example, when KLM Royal Dutch Airlines employed a traditional, human-powered customer care system, it handled 384000 client answers in 6 months, but it handled 2 billion customer support messages for over 500000 customers using Chatbot.

Chatbots can be classified into the following categories:

Chatbots can be classified according to a variety of factors, but the most important distinction is always made based on their function. As a result, the following are the two primary categories of Chatbots:

Chatbot that can stand alone:

A stand-alone Chatbot is a simple and underutilized type of Chatbot development. This form of Chatbot is exclusively available on a single company’s website. Customers must be present on the website to connect with bots in this form of Chatbot. Typically, stand-alone Chatbots are built from the ground up according to Kevin Rann. These Chatbots are tailored to the sort of company, the purpose, and the target audiences.

Chatbot Integrated Into Messenger:

Incorporated into the messenger Chatbots are chatbots that are developed in the shape of popular messengers like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and others. Customers nowadays are on social media, and social media is a strong, rapid, and engaging platform for business growth. These types of Chatbots are more popular than others. This form of Chatbot is designed to provide customer service to messengers 24 hours a day, seven days a week as per Kevin Rann. A Chatbot app development firm may design it for you at any moment if your business requires real-time engagement with a consumer for efficient help.

Chatbots’ underlying technology is as follows:

Chatbots, as we all know, are processed codes or software programs; they are unquestionably technological offspring. There are two sorts of technology that may be used to power a successful Chatbot, and they are as follows:

Chatbots with Rules

The term “rule-base” refers to a system that is based on rules. Chatbots work by following a set of software rules. These bots are also known as decision-tree bots as mentioned by Kevin Rann. They can only answer questions if they follow the set of regulations. Bots can only answer money, product, and service-related queries on a shopping website, for example. These bots are unable to benefit from the procedure.

ML/AI Chatbots

Machine-learning and artificial intelligence-based Chatbots are referred to as ML/AI Chatbots. These Chatbots aren’t bound by any rules; instead, they’re designed to learn from their interactions. These are intelligent bots that utilize the Natural Language Processing framework to grasp the context of the user’s communication before responding.

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