Definition
An AI chatbot is a chat on your website or messaging channel that answers visitors in plain language. It replies from your own business information, such as services, opening hours and policies, rather than from general knowledge.
When a question is outside what it knows, or a visitor wants a person, it collects their details and hands the conversation over. The assistant on the home page of this site is an example.
A good chatbot is honest about its limits. It answers what it knows, says when it does not, and never promises things only a person can confirm, such as availability or special terms. Every conversation can be reviewed later, so the answers keep getting better over time.
Applications
- Frequently asked questions and opening hours.
- Questions about products and services.
- Capturing and qualifying leads.
- Booking appointments.
- Support in more than one language, for example English and Vietnamese.
Well-known tools
Tools that are widely used for this kind of work, given as examples from the field. The right choice depends on your data, your systems and where the solution has to run.
- Rasa: a framework for conversational assistants.
- Botpress: a platform for building and hosting chatbots.
- Voiceflow: a visual builder for chat and voice agents.
- Dialogflow: Google Cloud's conversational agent service.
Real-world problems
The same questions all day
Staff answer the same few questions again and again by hand, which leaves less time for the conversations that really need a person.
No answers out of hours
Visitors arrive in the evening and at weekends, when nobody is there to reply, and many of them leave without trying again later.
Leads lost to slow replies
A visitor who waits too long moves on. A chatbot answers at once and passes the lead on.
Wrong answers
A bot that is not grounded in your information can invent things. Limiting it to your facts and handing over when unsure avoids that.