Chatbots are everywhere these days. Radically reshaping the mobile app landscape, with their ability to mimic conversation and offer instantaneous digital connections, chatbots are changing how we interact online. Steadily on the rise, many enterprises are spending more on bots per year than traditional mobile app development.
Across many industries, chatbots are taking the place of customer service agents and data collecting services. Of course, a chatbot programming, technology, and type depends a lot upon the customer base it is going to serve. Here is a breakdown with the nine most popular types of chatbots and the functions they serve:
1. Support Chatbots
Generally designed with the goal of solving a specific problem, support chatbots require context awareness, a personality and multi-turn capability. Typically serving as a companion to help walk users through a variety of business processes, support chatbots can also usually answer a large selection of FAQs. These days, many support chatbots use deep learning and natural language processing to perform actions.
As the use of these customer service chatbots becomes common practice across industries, you will see support chatbots being used everywhere from e-commerce to food ordering and digital marketing to healthcare. Always looking for ways to improve customer satisfaction, support chatbots are virtually a business necessity.
2. Skill Chatbots
Using a simpler configuration compared to their support counterparts, skill chatbots are a single-turn-type that doesn’t require much of contextual awareness. That being said, due to the fact that they are expected to follow a command in order to perform an action, skill chatbots must be quick and require powerful NLP.
Although some chatbots that offer skill features could be classified into several type, when you command a chatbot to carry out an order, like ‘switch on the lights,’ you’re interacting with a skill set.
3. Assistant Chatbots
Much like support chatbots in that they need to be able to engage in seamless conversation and answer a large variety of question, assistant chatbots also need to be adept at retaining user interest.
When you engage with Apple’s Siri, for example, you’re using an assistant chatbot. Rather than designed solely to perform one task of operate predictably every time, these types of chatbots are capable of revealing a level of personality that can keep the user interested.
4. Transactional Chatbots
Here the classifications can become a bit blurry, as transactional chatbots also play an assistant role in that they act on behalf of humans to perform various transactions. When a bot helps you place an order, make a reservation, or generally facilitates a consumer transaction, you’re dealing with a transactional chatbot.
These types of chatbots are designed to help users be more productive and avoid hitting roadblocks during the purchasing process. These chatbots often interact with external systems to perform transactions.
5. Information Gathering Chatbots
Sometimes designed to gather and sometimes to distribute information, these chatbots typically use AI and text classification technologies. A news bot, for instance, can send push notifications or offer news recommendations to users.
Information gathering bots, on the other hand, can act as research assistants by extracting as much information as possible either from a human or from an internet resource like a website or an eBook. These types of chatbots are important for research-based tasks in the digital marketing sector. These information gathering bots are also playing an increasingly vital role in education and corporate training.
6. Scripted Chatbots
As the name suggests, this type of chatbot uses a predefined set of questions to interact with customers at various stages of the transaction or learning process. Using a questionnaire format, the development involved anticipating what kind of questions a customer is likely to ask and then taking user prompts to instruct the bot to take an action or respond.
7. Social Messaging Chatbots
Social messaging chatbot have been designed and integrated within a specific social messaging platform. Whether Messenger, WhatsApp or Slack, these need to have advanced conversation skills that make it easy to interact. By simulating the kind of easy communication that exists among friends, these chatbots are informed primarily by the desire to allow interaction to flow naturally.
8. Context Enabled Chatbots
Even more highly advanced conversational bots, context enabled chatbots use machine learning and artificial intelligence to remember conversations that have already happened. Allowing them to build on information they have gathered in the past, they can accumulate user specifics to learn and grow over time.
Developing alongside the users that are interacting with them, these kind of chatbots have the capacity to become a more integral part of the lives of the people using them.
9. Voice Enabled Chatbots
Another feature of many context enabled chatbots, voice enabled chatbots are all about creating a more personalized experience for the user. With the ability to answer questions, act upon requests, and perform various creative tasks, these chatbots can also quickly become a more intimate part of their users lives.
