Ready To Be Deployed, Chatbots!!! — Part-4
Hey everyone, so today I am going to discuss some of the well known, and real instant chatbot development tools, with whom, you can literally make your first chatbot within minutes, and once you know the process, may be quicker!
So, once you know what to look for there are many tools in the market, and almost all of them are free to use, upto some certain limits though. Here I will discuss two of them which I have used myself, and liked in the past. There are plenty of other tools though, and good ones as well, but it is almost impossible to mention all of them in one place, but if you know what to search for, Google has all the answers.
Starting with my two favourite tools, here I go:
- Google’s DialogFlow(API.AI)
Dialogflow, earlier known as API.AI, is a chatbot development tool, developed by Google itself. Dialogflow works with the technologies like Google’s NLP and AI in the background. Dialogflow is really easy to work with and has a pretty friendly user interface, as expected from any of the Google’s product.
This was initially developed by Speaktoit, but was bought by google in 2016, and later on it became a part of google cloud.
Many of the actions that you have on your google assistant are made with Google’s Dialogflow only.
Dialogflow has many features like, we can use pre-built agents, these are just sample agents and obviously you have to work on those to get a production level action, but still, they have plenty of options to choose from, and due to it’s simple interface, these agents/actions are fun to work with.
Also, Dialogflow has many single click integration platforms as well. You can integrate your chatbot with many chatting platforms like Slack, Skype and Telegram etc. really very easily. Also it is readily integrate with Google Assistant as well. Telephonic integration for these chatbots is again just a single step away.
Also if you want to integrate the Dialogflow’s agent into your own custom app, that again is really easy. Dialogflow has a very well explained and open to all documentation which almost acts like a step by step guide for the whole journey.
All in all, Dialogflow is the perfect tool, which can help you develop any kind of chatbot, as intelligent as you need, and that too without any prior coding experience, obviously for some features you will need to code. But those are quite very optional.
2. IBM Watson/Assistant:
IBM Watson, it’s a big name, right!
IBM’s Watson came in the front-page news in 2011, when IBM’s supercomputer Watson won a million dollars against human competitors in a game show called Jeopardy. Since then, IBM launched a lot many services and products sharing it’s name. There’s a whole set of tools under the name of IBM Watson.
The one I am particularly interested is IBM Watson Assistant. IBM Watson Assistant, is also chatbot developer tool, similar to Google’s Dialogflow. It has NLP empowered engines and some of the, way more advanced features. But obviously with some restrictions. For example, though its user interface is pretty easy and user friendly but if compared to Google’s Dialogflow, there’s almost no match ( in my perspective though ).
When it comes to things like integration and webhooks, Watson provides similar features as of Dialogflow, there are a number of ready to go integrations available with Watson Assistant as well.
Watson Assistant documentation is second to none, it is a step by step guide to how to make and deploy a chatbot. Watson’s NLP and AI is a very powerful feature, but the catch is, the powerful NLP and AI comes at a price. It is not a part of the free trial that we get initially, so this is a small drawback with IBM Watson’s Assistant.
I am telling and going to tell alot about these tools in this series but we have to understand that this is not a blog about Watson Assistant or Google’s Dialogflow pros and cons. I am not going to compare and do stuff like that with these two tools. I am just going to write as many informative pieces as possible about the chatbots. So the best thing would be, if you will try these tools for yourself.
I just found a list of different chatbot development tools, some of these are NLP enabled, some are not, but all of these are really great tools if you want to develop a chatbot. Many are missing in the list though, so feel free to contribute if you know or have used any in the past.
Lets say, now if you try some of these tools, I don’t know which one you will like, but I found Dialogflow the most lucrative when it comes to ease of producing chatbots. It has one of the easiest and the most user friendly interfaces among the tools that I have used. You don’t have to write a single line of code if you are going with Dialogflow, unless you want to(I’ll show you in the next parts of this series only). Also when trying to integrate the Dialogflow’s chatbot in the system it is totally code free for you. If you want to implement any kind of logic which if isn’t supported by Dialogflow internally, then with a little bit of code you can make webhooks, which will do the deed for you. These webhooks can be written in different languages, the ones I have tried are Python and JavaScript. But it supports many others as well so try some of it, and come back to me if you find something really interested, will be looking forward to it.
From the next blog I will start with the tutorials for Dialogflow, will start by making a simple chatbot step by step with the images and explanation of the keywords which we will be needing throughout the process.
