According to Gartner, chatbots are expected to take over 85% of customer service interactions by 2020, and astonishingly, a cost savings of over $8 billion is estimated by 2020 through the use of chatbots, primarily in the banking and healthcare sectors. Offering enhanced efficiency in a reduced timeframe, chatbots are becoming conventional, with brands and enterprises increasingly engaged in chatbot development and deployment.
For enterprises, chatbots need to offer scalability, agility, and cost-effectiveness across a variety of functions and should be able to integrate with the customer relationship management and supply chain management systems of the business. These requirements can be reliably fulfilled by various bot development frameworks that can cater to the high-end technological and architectural needs of chatbot development. However, choosing an apt framework for your business from the array of frameworks available in the market needs caution and judgment.
How to Choose a Bot Development Framework
Various bot development frameworks available in the industry vary in the level of complexity, integration capabilities, and functionalities. Enterprises should select a development framework that offers the ability to customize chatbots in sync with their business objectives which often revolve around managing customer service workflows and solving product queries. These bot development frameworks are used by developers and coders to build bots from scratch using programming languages.
Let’s check out the top 5 bot development frameworks available for enterprises.
Top 5 Bot Development Frameworks for Enterprises
1. Microsoft Bot Framework
The framework allows connecting, building and deploying intelligent bots to naturally interact with your users on a website, app, Slack, Facebook messenger, and more. Developers get a developer portal and SDK to build Bots along with a Bot Connector service to connect to the social channels like Twitter, Slack etc., and a Bot Directory to discover and use existing bots.
The framework offers some truly useful tools to the developers offering automatic translation to over 30 languages, debugging, user and conversation state management, and more. Enhanced features like natural language processing, answering queries, managing multiple models and adding cards and buttons can be incorporated using Azure Bot Service. Another popular tool to consider is IBM Watson.
2. IBM Watson
The easy and intuitive interface of IBM Watson allows quick deployment and optimization of chatbots for your business. Equipped with SDKs for multiple programming languages including Java, Python, iOS and Node, Watson is popular for its AI, machine learning and natural language processing and reasoning capabilities.
The framework offers easy integration with different social media messaging channels such as Twilio, Facebook, and Slack. It can be deployed on your site, in a mobile app, in the customer service tools, in messaging channels, and on the phone, and supports 13 languages.
3. Wit.ai
The framework explores and learns human language from every interaction, and is free, even for commercial use. With Wit.ai, it’s easy to create text or voice-based bots that allows humans to chat on their preferred messaging platform. It is an NLP platform allowing developers to configure the entities and intents, and offer SDKs for Node.js, Python, and Ruby.
Wit.ai not just lets you build bots but also lets you create automation for wearable devices, voice interface for a mobile app, and home electronics hardware, and support 70+ languages.
4. Botpress
This is a dual-license open source bot development platform based on modular architecture. The framework offers UI allowing people without the technical know-how to manage Chatbots post-deployment. The framework integrates with third-party apps and APIs and supports channels like Messenger, Skype, SMS, Webchat and more.
Features like Flow Editor, Dialogue Manager, and Natural Language Understanding makes it simple for developers to build and debug complex conversation flows. Botpress also offers detailed analytics revealing how the bot is being used and how to improve it further. Botpress has a module for just about everything a bot should do, thus letting you focus on what really matters.
5. Dialogflow
This is a Google-owned AI-powered chatbot development framework which is quite handy for your voice or text-based bot. The framework comes with pre-built agents, built-in natural-language processing feature, SDKs for multiple programming languages, and an easy import and extract process. The framework is intelligent enough to map user’s queries to the database available with its backend server.
Moreover, Dialogflow works with an array of platforms and supports wearables and devices such as Google Home and Amazon Alexa. It offers easy integration with Facebook, Messenger, Telegram, Twitter and more, and provides detailed analytics report and error reports for your app.
These are the top 5 frameworks that you can explore when you plan to go for a chatbot. If you aren’t sure which chatbot framework you should go with, it’s best to hire a chatbot development company with the requisite expertise to get things done seamlessly.
Conclusion
Before you decide to go for chatbot development for your business, it’s vital to delineate your business objectives, the purpose of the chatbot, and the benefits the chatbot is expected to bring to your business. The next step is to explore the best available chatbot frameworks like Microsoft Bot Framework, IBM Watson, Wit.ai, Botpress, and Dialogflow, and to analyze them all to decide the best framework that suits your business needs. A reliable bot framework development company can assist you to choose the suitable framework and develop a chatbot based on your needs.