If you're planning to build the best chatbot, you must consider the following factors:
- Bot Capability: It is essential to decide your chatbot's ability. Most commonly, it must function on your desired platforms, it must be able to perform transactional functions, and it must be able to provide accurate information.
- Cost: Developing a custom bot costs much more than developing a bot on a platform. It is crucial to decide the expenses based on the bot's capability, its integration with social media platforms and messaging channels, and the number of people the bot is required to chat with.
- Time: You must determine how much time the whole bot building process takes. Several approaches such as analytics, payments, subscriptions, and integration with several platforms can take a considerable time.
It is easier to develop a chatbot after taking into account all the above factors.
Bot building platforms (AWS, Azure Chatbot)
A chatbot is an application that imitates a real customer care representative’s activity and deals with customers. It is always wise to build a chatbot using a bot-building platform. These platforms allow us to produce personalized chatbots and reduce bot building time to a large extent. Some of the prevalent bot-building platforms are: AWS and Azure Chatbot.
Custom bot
If you are creating a chatbot based on your personalized API integrations, such as a healthcare assistant or shopping assistant, it is highly recommended that you build your custom chatbot from scratch. In developing such chatbots, you can use custom logic and design it based on your business requirements. However, building a custom bot is much more complex than leveraging the help of a bot-building platform.
Custom bot vs Azure, AWS chatbots
To determine the best chatbot for you, you must compare custom bot and bot-building platforms based on the following factors:
Cost
- Developing a custom bot is expensive. The initial bot building costs can be very high.
- The initial cost on a bot-building platform is almost negligible or none.
Development and maintenance
- Changes can be difficult to make in custom bots as it involves a lot of code altering.
- Maintaining custom bots is costly.
- Making changes on platforms and maintaining them is much easier.
Marketing cost
- Custom bot development is expensive, and very little money is left for marketing.
- Bot building on platforms costs less and more money is left for marketing.
Build time
- The custom bot takes a much longer build time than platforms.
- Platform bots take very little build time and are easy to develop.
Planning
- Custom bots take a lot of planning and time.
- Platforms such as AWS and Azure Chatbot offer a flow-chart like interface for bot building by making the planning much more accessible.
Advantages and disadvantages of chatbot-building platforms (Azure, AWS)
Advantages:
- They are easy to use and are sophisticated enough for big businesses.
- It is easy to link these chatbots to various social media platforms such as Facebook, Skype, Telegram.
- They are free and easy to access.
- They help in integrating with third-party services.
- They help in connecting with mobile apps and with your website.
Disadvantages:
- For building complex chatbots, custom bots are ideal. Bot platforms don't help much.
- Not having any technological idea won't help you on these platforms.
- Bot builder platforms such as Azure or AWS Chatbot might not always be successful in bringing desired results.
Benefits of developing a custom bot
- Best for building complex chatbots with unique functions.
- The custom bot development team makes sure it's bug-free.
- The development team provides maintenance and bot improvement even after development.
- The development team finds correct technical solutions for business needs.
Create the best chatbot for your business with the help of [24]7.ai
To build the best chatbot, it is vital to assess business needs, decide its complexity, platforms they want to integrate, and specific features it must have. After answering these questions, one can decide whether to build a custom bot or use a bot-building platform. To create the ideal chatbot, make sure you visit [24]7.ai.
