Best Chatbots
Based on In-Depth Reviews

Chatbots? Please Explain.

Bot, talkbot, interactive agent… chatbots are known by many names. They’re basically a machine powered by artificial intelligence that can have an exchange with a consumer. Chatbots are designed to help consumers complete a task or provide answers to their questions. With Natural Language Understanding (NLU), chatbots can understand words and interpret meaning. Chatbots may provide a considerable benefit to your business by taking some of the load off your human employees and providing customer support at all times.

We asked Chris Messina, product designer and technologist, to describe chatbots in the simplest of terms. “Chatbots, primarily, are a computer program that can use text and voice to interact or talk with,” he said. “So rather than using a system of menus to figure out what a computer program is able to do, ideally with a chatbot you can ask it for exactly what you want.”

Chris Messina. Photo courtesy of Katie Thompson.

Another expert, Botfuel co-CEO Javier Gonzalez, told us how chatbots are designed to recognize the user’s intent and extract information: “The last step is for the program to give an answer to the user in a personalized and understandable way.”

Chatbots may respond to text commands or speech. They’ve been encoded to simulate humans while communicating with actual flesh and blood individuals. We know how this sounds, but chatbots aren’t that strange. If anyone has asked Apple’s Siri to solve a math problem or commanded Amazon’s Alexa to play Taylor Swift’s latest, then they’ve communicated with a chatbot. Interacting with these machines is more common than one would think.

This is How Chatbots Work

With the artificial intelligence they’ve been given, chatbots interpret voice or read a text and offer consumers a prepared response. The whole point is to provide a service without the intervention of an actual person.

While there are different types of chatbots, they all have one thing in common: they’ve been created to interact with humans in order to complete a task and/or lend support. Some are smarter and more sophisticated than others, but they’re all made of ones and zeros with the purpose of serving consumers. It’s becoming a lot more common to see a chat icon on a homepage where consumers can interact with a bot to get answers to basic questions.

Some chatbots can schedule appointments, order groceries, provide weather updates, and answer basic questions. On one particularly impressive occasion, a chatbot called and interacted with a person in order to make dinner reservations. The exchange is so flawless, it just might make someone question if they’ve ever had a conversation with an artificial entity, completely unbeknownst to them. 

How Your Business Could Benefit

Chatbots allow you to provide a basic service to consumers without the help of an actual employee. Many businesses aim to improve the quality of the consumer’s experience with an easy-to-use and efficient tool to handle uncomplicated tasks. What it boils down to is saving on manpower and increasing profit over the long run.

Twenty years into the 21st century, consumers are not only expecting modern communication with the businesses they patronize, but they’re also demanding it. By implementing an automated chatbot, your customers will have a better experience that could drive up sales and business opportunities. And it goes without saying that customers who have a good experience may return for repeat business. Chatbots allow your business to interact with customers at all hours, providing support and cultivating priceless loyalty.

When Does A Chatbot Hand It Off To A Human?

Most chatbots have limits to the services and support they may provide a customer. If and when that limit is reached, handing off the exchange to a human agent is an essential part of the process. This handoff can’t be sloppy or time-consuming; otherwise, the consumer may feel like his or her time is being wasted and you don’t want that under any circumstances.

Depending on the level of sophistication behind your chatbot, these handoffs can be handled in a variety of ways. The important thing is to let consumers know when they’re speaking to a bot and when they’re corresponding with an actual person. Good transparency breeds trust, and in business trust is paramount.

Primary Benefits of Chatbots

Saving Money With The Machines

The cost of setting up and implementing a chatbot for a business is considerably lower than hiring and training new personnel. Also, the maintenance costs of chatbots won’t set your business back a whole lot. Just like any piece of software, updates along with the occasional check-up are par for the course.

If a client receives a prompt reply, regardless of the time of day, they might feel like your business is looking out for them. Furthermore, some chatbots have the ability to communicate in different languages, affording you the opportunity to broaden your reach.

At the end of the day, you are investing in infrastructure that will not occupy any physical space but will provide concrete results. Keep your consumers happy and informed at all times and they’re bound to come back to you.

Customer Support During Off-Hours

Can businesses compete in modern times if they do not offer 24/7 support? For Javier Gonzalez, it comes down to the type of business you run. “I would say if you're a business-to-consumer or a business-to-business targeting a mass market, then [it] would be pretty difficult [to compete]. You really need to be present across the full spectrum of hours. For B2C and B2B, I would say it's a must.”

A lot of modern-day consumers would actually prefer to engage with a chatbot than to speak with a customer service representative over the phone. A chatbot gives the consumer the ability to choose how they will interact with a brand or a business without the occasional discomfort some people experience when dealing with another person. Chatbots always communicate professionally, without anger or irritability. Simply put, chatbots never have a bad day. Increasing the probability of a positive experience is a good strategy, especially when considering that 91 percent of unhappy consumers never return. 

With that in mind, 24/7 access to your business can be great, but only if the support is excellent. If your chatbot falls flat, you’d probably be better off without it.

There’s also the aspect of consumer loyalty to consider. As Chris Messina told us: “If you can build a chatbot that's able to efficiently ask customers what it is that they're looking for, then I think that's a great way of not only building loyalty because you're showing that you care and you're solving problems efficiently, but then you're providing them with a really efficient way of getting through that process.”

Basic Tasks

Chatbots can lend basic customer support to users by providing consistent information at all times. The bot can also refer users to the part of the website where they can find the information they’re looking for. This helps promote better navigation of your website and ultimately results in higher customer satisfaction.

Your chatbot may also provide the business with basic analytical information about the user who is visiting your website. Furthermore, the chatbot could be programed to ask the user if his or her experience was satisfactory. By gathering this information, you can make the necessary adjustments to better serve your customers.

It’s so easy, a machine could do it!

The Limitations of Chatbots

For Starters, Chatbots Are Not Human

Verbal exchanges between two people tend to be very nuanced. Tone, pauses, emphasis, wordless utterances… these all convey messages without the use of actual words. Also, so much of what consumers are likely to ask has to do with context. Remove that from the equation and there will be various speed bumps throughout the exchange. Since chatbots read language mechanically, context and nonverbal cues aren’t always understood. They are still unable to fully understand language.

Some experts don’t hesitate to recognize the technological restraints surrounding chatbots. “I think there are many limitations,” said Javier Gonzalez. “One of the signs that the market is maturing is that people are more aware of the limitations of chatbots themselves. The first one is really about language understanding. Of course, chatbots are improving over time, but every user that has used Siri knows that chatbots or voicebots are far from being able to understand the subjectivities of human language.”

While there's still plenty of room for chatbots to continue to evolve, for the time being, conversations will have to be limited to simple queries that may be solved with scripted answers. Chatbots are efficient tools for businesses, but they can’t replace humans. At least not yet. More sophisticated communication with chatbots is still not available, but some technologists argue that such advances are imminent. 

Javier Gonzalez. Photo courtesy of himself.

Some Tasks Are Difficult for Chatbots to Perform

When two people are having a conversation, there’s a lot of back-and-forth where one person fills in the blanks for the other and the exchange of information flows in a very natural way. Chatbots cannot engage in this kind of dynamic. What this means is that a chatbot will be unable to complete every request a consumer throws at it, especially if it deviates from their procedural nature and requires an answer that has not been scripted and programed.

Chatbots are unemotional so there’s no chance they’ll show empathy when trying to solve a problem. For instance, if a customer needs to return a gift that was intended for a recently-deceased relative, the chatbot will not offer anything by way of comfort or condolences. Or if a customer is expressing frustration, a chatbot cannot sense anger and take the necessary steps to defuse it. This puts chatbots at a disadvantage in situations where emotional intelligence may be required to provide the best possible support. 

Just because a chatbot can interact and talk with consumers, that does not mean it has the ability to truly converse with them. That requires a level of sophistication and artificial intelligence that has yet to be achieved.

Alternatives to Chatbots

In a perfect world, the best alternative to a chatbot is a human agent who can provide real-time answers to any queries that a consumer may present. That said, this will require the business to employ 24/7 staff.

Another alternative is to add a Frequently Asked Questions section to your website and/or social media platforms, covering a wide range of subjects. If you know your business and your customers well, coming up with these questions shouldn’t be a difficult task. Is this an antiquated method? Perhaps. But it puts facts in front of consumers in a user-friendly format that can be searched for their convenience.

How ‘Bout These Bot-Blunders?

Politically Incorrect Bots

Not everything runs without error in chatbot land. Take Microsoft’s chatbot Tay, for instance. This chatbot was unleashed on the Twitterverse with the understanding that the bot would become more intelligent with each exchange, learning a little more each time and soaking up the lingo and knowledge of all those noble creatures tweeting away without a care in the world. 

What Microsoft did not take into account, however, is that Tay would learn from everyone, even those with bad intentions.

In less than 24 hours, users turned Tay into a propaganda platform for unsavory and racist remarks--all because its language was developed using public data. As a result of an apparent lack of filter, thousands of tweets were posted that many considered offensive. 

Bots That Drive a Hard Bargain

And then we have chatbots who are a little too pushy. Now, let’s not get mad at them, it’s just their programed nature. Some bots have been reported to ignore user requests to unsubscribe. Maybe they like consumers too much to let them go? Also, having a chatbot send too many messages can be off-putting. No one likes spam, regardless of who or what sent it.

Mr. Messina warned of chatbots pushing too hard to get a sale. “If you're going to be pushing sales or trying to increase customer loyalty, have your coworker or colleague say the exact lines out loud in conversation with you and see how it feels,” he said. “If it feels manipulative or just out of the blue, that's where you breach that trust and you cause people to ask the question, ‘What's really going on here? What is this really about? Do you actually care about me as a customer?’”

How the Chatbot Industry has Evolved

Early Days

The first chatbot ever was named Eliza, developed in the 1960s by MIT. Modern chatbots didn't make their debut till 2009 when WeChat launched their platform. Everything changed quickly thereafter, paving the way for the bots we know today. Just six years after WeChat’s launch, 1.4 billion people interacted with a chatbot at some point in 2015. For context, that’s the entire population of the African continent.

In 2016, artificial intelligence technology began to be used in the design of chatbots. This changed the game completely, but like any beta phase, there were some hiccups as Chris Messina pointed out: “I think one of the problems with the first wave of chatbots starting around 2016 to 2017 was that there was sort of this seeming notion that almost all problems that customers have could be solved by customer service styled chatbots.” That notion, of course, turned out to be unfounded.

Modern Novelties

In 2011, Apple released the iPhone 4S with Siri, a personal assistant that employs natural language. Users can command Siri to read text messages aloud, reply to them, and call specific contacts. And who could forget Amazon’s Alexa? Oh, how she gracefully takes our music requests and tells us about the weather.

These personal assistants have become a part of everyday life. Along with others such as Google Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana, these technologies have normalized what may have seemed bizarre in recent times. This new world where so many people have exchanges with machines has become much more receptive to the possibilities that chatbots represent.

The Future of Chatbots

The State of the Industry Today

Businesses always need to find new ways to stay ahead of their competition in order to succeed. With that in mind, chatbots are becoming a valuable commodity among businesses that are striving to provide open customer communications around the clock. As such, chatbot providers have made improvements to their platforms in an effort to maintain quality.

Javier Gonzalez has seen these developments firsthand. “I think the biggest change I've seen is the improvement in design for a specific use case. The conversational design of chatbots has much improved. For the end-user, the experience is getting much better.”

And yet, despite these new advances, Chris Messina warns of one big limitation: “Many of the leading chatbots that are globally deployed, and the three best known are Siri, Alexa, and the Google Assistant, still are not really able to have conversations.”

What’s Next?

Matt Schlicht, the founder of Chatbots Magazine, made some predictions in 2016 about chatbots’ potential place in our daily lives. Besides talking about the increasing need for bots in business, Mr. Schlicht predicts that bots will be faster and easier to use than any other technology available and will eventually play a more essential role than websites or mobile apps. While all this has not exactly come to pass in the intervening years, there are signs that we are indeed headed that way.

Facebook Messenger, a giant platform where consumers engage with chatbots, grew in just three years from 200 million users to 1.3 billion. Growth of that magnitude is something modern businesses can no longer ignore.

There’s a whole new world of possibility opening up when it comes to chatbots. And yet for technologists such as Mr. Messina, developers have merely scratched the surface: “They're going to have to figure out how to make those interfaces more sublime, easier to use, more natural, more persistent, more ubiquitous. So, I think we're still in the very early innings of this. If you think about how the iPhone only came out in 2007, we're still only 20 years into what you would consider the real mobile phone era and prior to that, we had computers for 30 or 40 years. So, if I were to think about conversational software over the next 10 to 20 years, it's only going to become more natural, especially with more of the world's population coming up online.”