If you want to make a ChatBot App
There are thousands of ChatBots created in the past year, most are being left after the first time trial.
Nature language is much harder to understand than we thought. Till now, there is no Chatbot that changes our life. We found out that we won’t really “chat” with a bot often, instead, we “make an order”. So the only useful Chatbots are not really for chatting but only for services.
After tested a bunch of conversational UI Chatbots, I picked 6 comparably better UX Chatbots Apps below. If you want to make a ChatBot App, the first step, check them out.
1. Facebook Messager ChatBots and Chatfuel — a third platform that creates Chatbots in minutes
The biggest problem for all bots here are Discovery and Retention. So some recommended bots here people keep using are high frequently use service apps, except for the “idol” one:
Meditation — MeditateBot
News — TechCrunch and ABC News
Finance — Trim
Football— Toni, the Football ChatBot
Idol — JWOWW (nearly 100 million likes)
Trip planning — Hipmunk
E-pet— Magic Monsters
Though the performance of Bots is not so awesome, the good thing is, FB Chatbot’s API is robust and very open. That gives us chance to make our own Chatbots easy and quick. I’ve tried to use Chatfuel to generate my first Bot. It turns out that the interface is very clean and easy to use, OMG, much better than WeChat’s backend.
Create AI Chat Bot for Facebook
It supports so many Plugins, but the interface still looks consistent and clean.
I have to say I’m a little more optimistic about Chatbots’ future after creating one.
2. ada
This Chatbot has the best UX compare to others, and the interface fits well.
The design of ada ensures Chatbot’s advantages to the full play — focus.
It only asks one question at a time, and it hides the menu button on the right bottom. The key flow is just a redesign of an a-question-a-time survey, but the Chat interface makes it more fun and easy.
3. Lark
It’s one of the earliest conversational UI apps in the world that works well. The CEO of Lark said many users don’t want to share their personal health data with real people, but no problem with bots. So Lark does the job very well, it’s always a pleasant experience to use it. I think it is because Lark set the expectation and contains extremely well.
4. Luka
This app can help you find restaurants in the bay area. It has a great design interface and works well for finding restaurants, but they don't want to limit Luka for only doing that. Luka trying to build a Chatbot AI platform that has multiple Bots like News/Weather and more. It's competitor Quartz • News in a whole new way on the App Store may not be happy about that.
5. Google Allo
Can we change the search bar and it results in a Chat interface? The Assistant in Allo said yes. The conversational interface helps users focus on one thing at a time, and by providing possible next step options, users don’t need to type a lot. Works well on Mobile. Thanks to daddy Google, this might be the most powerful Bot on market.
6. Duolingo Bots
Duolingo Bots | Learn a Language with Conversational Bots
I believe early-stage language teaching can be standardized and automate, so Bot might do a better job than humans. This idea is not new in education, but only the company with a lot of data can win, Duolingo has the advantage without a doubt.
At last, the Apps I recommended above are positive examples. To design your own Chatbot, you need some negative examples as well. Read this article:
It reveals all the reasons why and how chatbots failed, highly recommended.
Personally, I think conversational interaction just one of the many ways we interact with machines. And machines become Bots if they can do it well. I hope one day as the technology develops and human beings get used to communicating with bots, we can define the best scenarios to use Chatbot and use it well.