The 3 Types of Chatbots

These days, I spend most of my time helping people design chatbots. What I’ve found is that the most difficult part of designing and building a chatbot is the first step — going from conception to developing a model that will inform how the chatbot is built.

My specialty is taking ideas about what a given chatbot should or could do and converting it into an actionable blueprint (a mock-up, a flow diagram, etc). Once that’s done, the rest is really easy. After the first step, it’s mostly just a question of “wiring” the different blocks together.

But how do go from an abstract idea of what you want your chatbot to do to creating an actionable blueprint? In other words, how do you take all those ideas and goals for your chatbot and transform it into a tangible, directed plan for coding and building it?

How Many Chatbot Types Are There?

That may seem like a simple question, but you’d be surprised at how many different answers there are.

If you ask the developers of IBM’s Watson, they’ll tell you that there are 3 types of (business) chatbots (support, skills, and assistants). Other people say there are 7 types of chatbots. Still others say there are 5 kinds of “good” chatbots and 4 kinds of “bad” chatbots. Still others say there are just 2.5 types of chatbots (flow, AI, and hybrid)…