Watch a Recording of Our Webinar + Q&A on Designing a Conversational Chatbot Experience with NativeChat

In this webinar, I share best practices for creating modern conversational chatbots based on his firsthand experience from conceptualizing and building Progress® NativeChat™, the AI-driven platform for creating and deploying chatbots.

Yesterday, we aired our webinar on Designing a Conversational Chatbot Experience: Tales from the Trenches with NativeChat that you can now watch live. I would like to thank all 1,700 people who registered for the event, and for those of you who actively participated with Q&A during the event. As we experienced some audio breakdown in the final Q&A section, we have posted a summarized version of the Q&A section below.

Q: What is the type of systems that I can integrate NativeChat?

A: You can integrate with any system that exposes REST API in a JSON format. Alternatively, you can build standard web services or microservices such as Kinvey Custom Endpoints, AWS Lamda etc. that expose REST API on top of your existing systems.

Q: What channels do you support?

A: NativeChat can be directly integrated into a website, mobile app using NativeScript plug-in, Facebook Messenger, and Viber.

Q: Are there security implications of using a 3rd party platform like Facebook Messenger?

A: This depends on your own privacy policy. If you are using an external channel such as Facebook Messenger or any other social network you comply with their terms of use while uploading your chatbot for approval.

Q: Is Progress NativeChat a free platform? If not what’s the price?

A: NativeChat has a standard SaaS pricing available on our website.

Q: I didn’t understand the conversation training: Is it manual or automatic?

A: You have to provide a set of examples for every conversation so that the chatbot can understand the meaning of the sentence. There is no need to provide all different ways people can express themselves, but a range of 6–7 examples should be sufficient most of the time.

Q: Do you support voice or text to speech?

A: NativeChat is focused on managing conversations in a text-only format, and it doesn’t support voice.

Q: Do you support Apple iMessage?

A: Apple introduced Business Chat a few months back where businesses can use chatbots to communicate with customers over iMessage. However, Business Chat integrates with a few selected customer service providers and no open API for other systems to integrate. Apple plans to open up Business Chat with a wider audience in the near future.

Q: Are the NLU & NLP features built-in into NativeChat?

A: NativeChat works with its built-in NLU & NLP providers, but we can also switch to Google DialogFlow behind the scenes if you prefer their NLU & NLP algorithms.

Q: How is this any different to using something like Microsoft Cognitive services. Microsoft Cognitive services allow you to do all that you demoed.

A: You have to build it everything on your own with Microsoft. First, you need to write your own FormFlow or Waterfall implementation using .NET or Node.js, integrate NLP capabilities from Azure, use Bot Framework to connect to channels, the Bot Builder SDK to handle the flow. Based on our estimates, it takes 10–15 times more time to set up a chatbot using the Microsoft stack rather than use a declarative programming approach with NativeChat.

Q: Where is the chat data stored? I am thinking about GDPR etc. and the desire to keep data contained in certain countries or sets of countries.

A: We have the ability to store your chatbot’s data in Europe or North America. Further, our NativeChat product will be GDPR compliant, and we are taking measures to ensure that a chatbot developer has all the necessary resources to make his chatbot GDPR compliant as well.

Q: Do you have a Gartner or IDC NativeChat rating?

A: Yes, we are constantly briefing analyst groups from Forrester, Gartner, IDC, TEC, and 451 Research on the NativeChat technology and its success stories.

Q: Is it possible to get a trial version? If yes, what are the limitations?

A: You can register for a free technology trial here. You can build a full-fledged chatbot without the ability to publish it to a public channel.

Q: Is it better to use a guided conversation or AI-driven conversation?

A: In NativeChat you get both as you define the steps that need to be extracted from every conversation in a linear way. However, the cognitive flow can collect information from the user in any all possible combinations.

Q: I work exclusively with MS .NET framework. Can I integrate NativeChat in my project?

A: If NativeChat doesn’t have a direct integration with your technology, you can simply use a WebView to integrate the chat capabilities in your project.

Visit our Progress NativeChat website to learn more.