Chatbots are not considered artificial intelligence in a true sense, because they can’t learn things or make their own decisions. 

They typically work by picking up on keywords in the user’s messages, then matching that against a string of pre-written text in their database.

For example, if you send a message with the phrase ‘opening times’ somewhere in it, the chatbot is likely to send back a response with the company’s opening times, but it’s not thinking about what it’s doing.

‘True’ artificial intelligence that can hold a conversation with someone is only in the very early stages of development.

More and more, chatbots are using machine learning to bridge this gap and adapt their messages to the context of the conversation, but it’s a new development in the field.

They still work off the same underlying principle of pre-written messages.

Generally speaking, no. Once you buy a chatbot, you’ll have to spend some time writing up the lines you want it to say.

This is a positive, however, as it lets you control the dialogue and improve your customer experience of your website.

You can also use this opportunity to inject some of your brand identity into the customer service experience, like having the chatbot speak as your mascot, if you have one.

Basic chatbots are easy to install, but they become more complicated to install depending on the complexity of the chatbot.

On one end of the scale, chatbots that respond to the user with pre-written lines are close to ‘plug-and-play’.

Installation is easy, and the hardest part is setting up their ‘dialogue trees’.

Chatbots that use machine learning, however, can be much more time-consuming.

This is primarily because machine learning requires lots of data to start making accurate judgements, and corporate data is often too messy (‘noisy’) to do this easily.

If you’re using WordPress for your website, you may be able to install a plugin to provide a chatbot feature. Other types of websites may also provide a plug-in feature. 

Chatbots are a very alluring technology, but it’s important to stay realistic.

Here are a few things to keep in mind as you work to integrate a chatbot with your site.

They can’t do everything

Even the most advanced, AI-driven chatbot in the world can’t do as much as a live human being on the other end of the support call.

Rather than using them to conduct the entire user experience, deploy chatbots to help your live agents and take off the pressure of answering simple questions.

Multiple languages means multiple bots

Unless you plan on using an automated service like Google Translate to get foreign-language versions of your chatbot (a very bad idea, by the way), you’re going to have to write separate versions of every query for each language you support.

If you only want to target English-speaking customers, this isn’t a problem.

In today’s international marketplace, however, it’s usually worth hiring freelance translators to serve users from multiple regions.

Customers always prefer humans

No chatbot can perfectly imitate a human support agent.

If you make one that can, you’ll probably end up getting a Nobel Prize.

As such, customers always know that they’re talking to a robot, not a person.

This can lead to them feeling frustrated and skipping over the chatbot’s text in an attempt to reach a live agent, negating their usefulness.

Bots should be used in moderation – not to replace the entire customer support experience.

Every business has information that they need to tell the customer, like their opening hours, their prices or how to use their products.

The traditional way of doing this has been to simply write up long pages of text explaining all these details.

The issue is that people tend to glaze over or skip this information, leading to confusion and frustration down the line.

Chatbots, however, mimic real human conversations, which people are naturally more receptive to.

Even if they don’t pretend to be humans, they let customers ask the questions that concern them, at their own pace, rather than having to search through a long FAQ.

If you’ve been on the web long, you’ve almost certainly used a site that had a chatbot or virtual assistant in the corner.

Roughly 80% of businesses plan to use chatbots in one form or another, and that number is only going to increase as they grow more sophisticated.

While live service given by human operators is never going to die out completely, it’s likely to be reserved more and more solely for issues that the chatbots can’t handle.