June 24: Chatbots

 Chatbots

Chatbot Flow for Business Page

Learning How to Create Chatbots to Answer FAQs Using Facebook and Chatfuel

First things first, what is a chatbot? A chatbot is an automated system that is used to talk to people without the supervision of a person. One of their main uses, which we explored today, is how chatbots can be used by businesses to help customers when agents are not available. These systems are able to answer questions for customers based on inputs set by the company.

First, we used the website repl.it to learn about the code used to make chatbots. We used Python to create basic dialogue for the bot to follow, and then made several if-else statements to guide the bot through answering different questions. Through this we were able to interact with a chat bot in a capacity that was limited to the amount of code that we made.

Because creating code ourselves would take too long, we used a site called Chatfuel to connect to a Facebook page that we could add a chatbot to. This site made it easy to create a chatbot because all you had to create was a 'flow'. A flow in this sense is just the order of events that you give to your chatbot. For example: if you ask about the business hours, the flow will then tell the chatbot to present the information in the next message. I designed my chatbot to answer questions about the locations, hours, and menu for a fake pancake restaurant. The user has the option to click on boxes that display these areas of inquiry, then the flow leads them through the information.

Some pitfalls you might encounter while creating a chatbot include messing up the flow and answering all of your possible questions. If you do not properly set up your flow, your customers may not get the information they ask for. In the same sense, whichever questions you do not answer, your chatbot will not be able to provide customers with the information.