What are the different types of chatbots?

The relationship between customer and brand interaction completely transformed with the invention of chatbots. Being able to imitate conversations and offering immediate, digital connection, chatbots came across businesses like a firestorm. It was even predicted by Gartner
that by 2021, 50% above enterprises will pay out more on bot and chatbot creation as compared to the old mobile app development.
Businesses, other than industries are making the best use of chatbots. Chatbots, on one hand, are acting as 24/7 customer service agents for one business, whereas helping the other by giving data points to anticipate the behavior of the user. However, technology, programming, and the type of chatbot depend mostly on the customer base it will be serving. Below are the 6 main types of chatbots that are used to simplify the manner of interaction between businesses and their customers.

6 main types of Chatbots

The six main types of chatbots commonly used are:

1. Scripted/Quick reply bots
This type of chatbot, as the title indicates, is the one that is used to interact with the end customer via a predefined knowledge base and technical abilities that can capably respond to fixed instructions only. In this manner, the queries need to be lined up with the language programmed in the chatbot.

2. Natural Language Processing (NLP) Chatbots
Generally, chatbots are considered as one of the biggest applications of AI. At its core, chatbot makes use of an Artificial Intelligence technology — Natural Language Processing (NLP) to depict user’s input such as text or voice to an intent. Messages are classified in NLP chatbots and then, in order to obtain variables for an answer, language parsing is done.

3. Service/Action Chatbots
In order to complete the user’s request, these types of chatbots question relevant information from the user or take a certain action. The Airline industry mostly makes use of this type of chatbot. These are used by customers to check their flight booking, price of flight reserving, and also to check the statuses.

4. Social Messaging Chatbots
Social messaging chatbots are amalgamated within a social messaging platform such as Messenger, Whatsapp, Telegram, Slack, etc, allowing customers to directly communicate with the bot, similar to the way they do with their family or friends.

5. Context Enabled Chatbots
The most advanced form of conversational bots are the contextual chatbots. In order to remember the conversations that happened earlier, these types of chatbots make use of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, with particular users, to learn and grow with the passage of time. Contextual chatbots learn by experience with the user. A few examples of these chatbots are Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa, etc.

6. Voice-Enabled Chatbots
These types of chatbots make personalized experiences for users. Voice enabled chatbots accept the user’s input when he/she speaks, act upon his/her request, reply to his/her queries, and perform numerous creative tasks. By using text-to-speech (TTS) and voice recognition APIs, businesses can make their own voice-activated chatbot.

Different Chatbots for Business

Here are the top 5 types of chatbots you can use in your business:

1. Support Chatbots
   Support chatbots are made to solve specific problems. They ask for context awareness, personality, and multi-turn ability. They must be able to walk a user through the process of business and answer multiple FAQs. To perform actions, most of the support chatbots use deep learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP). For these chatbots the recognition of speech is optional.
   Support chatbots are used in all industries — mostly in human resources, retail, digital marketing, and health care. These chatbots save business resources and improve the satisfactory rate of customers.

2.Skills Chatbots
These types of chatbots are single-turn-type and don’t require contextual awareness much. They can simply follow an order to perform an action. Skills chatbots require powerful Natural
Language Processing (NPL) features and must work quickly. Amazon’s Alexa is one of the examples of Skills Chatbots.

3. Assistant Bots

Similar to support bots, assistant bots should be good at communicating and answering FAQs. They should be entertaining in order to keep the user engaged. A great example of an assistant bot is Siri by Apple. It not only follows the user’s instructions but responds in a funny manner if it doesn’t understand the user’s query.

4. Transactional Bots
Transactional bots can be classified as assistant bots as they sometimes perform an action on behalf of the user for various transactions. Many custom solutions are possible for transactional bots, helping users enhance their productivity as the bot performs transactions by interacting with the external systems. Like support chatbots, transactional bots are also used in various industries.

5. Informational and Information Gathering Chatbots
These types of chatbots help in collecting or disseminating information. A news bot, for instance, can send push notifications or suggest news to the users using Artificial Intelligence and text classification technologies. Information gathering chatbots act as research assistants by collecting as much information as they possibly can either from humans or the internet such as ebook or a website. They are used in the education, corporate training sector, and digital marketing sector in order to accomplish research-based tasks. Classification of Chatbots (Technical)

Technical chatbots can be classified into 3 main types:

1. Menu/Button based Chatbots
These are the most basic types of chatbots in today’s market. Mostly, these bots are glorified decision tree hierarchies given to the user in the form of buttons. Like automated phone menus, all of us interact with almost daily, menu/button based chatbots require the user to make various selections to dig deeper towards the final answer. Thus, these chatbots are the slowest in order to get the user to the value they want.

2. Keyword Recognition based chatbots
These chatbots are able or try to hear what users type and respond correctly. To determine how to give an appropriate answer to the user, keyword-recognition based chatbots use customizable keywords and Artificial Intelligence. Such chatbots fall short when they are asked to answer various similar questions. The bot starts to slip when there are keyword redundancies among various related questions. A hybrid of keyword-recognition and menu/button based chatbots can mostly be seen nowadays. These chatbots allow users to choose whether to ask their question directly or make use of the bot’s menu buttons if the keyword recognition functionality yields poor results or the user asks for guidance to find answers.

3. Contextual chatbots
The most advanced form of conversational bots are the contextual chatbots. In order to remember the conversations that happened earlier, these types of chatbots make use of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, with particular users, to learn and grow with the passage of time. Contextual chatbots learn by experience with the user. A few examples of these chatbots are Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa, etc.
If you are not sure which of these chatbots is right for you? Contact us to help you to choose the right on.