You're Understanding Chatbots Wrong — Here's What You Need to Know

Chatbot as the name suggests is a software through which users can access resources by simply chatting with it. Chatbots are usually deployed on websites but can also be used at other sites like on mobile apps, WhatsApp application, Facebook, Telegram, slack, etc or through SMS system and desktop apps. These days there is a lot of confusion when it comes to chatbots. People often assume that a chatbot is always AI powered but in reality, chatbots can be of three main types. A rule or script-based bot A FAQ bot and An actual AI bot. An AI bot can further use a pre-trained model or train a model for the particular case. Let’s look into the key differences between these three types of chatbots or for ease of use simply bots. A rule-based bot is almost a flowchart converted into a chatbot. It uses buttons to guide the user to where the builder wants them to visit. The buttons are usually options and sometimes yes or no ones. A rule-based bot can also accept inputs and store them in something called a backend for later retrieval. It can send messages to the user ask it to select dates, time, etc. usually while booking appointments. Free flow of inputs is almost non-existent here, but these are the simplest ones to build and deploy on your choice of platform. The second type which can be called a FAQ bot is the point where a bit of AI comes to picture. This is where you train the chatbot to understand humans' natural language. For example, if you type the word ‘tomorrow’, it detects that you are trying to choose a date, if you enter ‘Bolivia’, it detects that you are specifying a location, etc. An AI is essentially the predictive or detective or understanding capability of a system, which thrives on patterns. It sees a pattern and then predicts the next one in the chain by fitting the pattern and some AIs’ get better over time by essentially ‘learning’ from feedback and reviews. So, in an NLP chatbot or a FAQ chatbot you train the bot to detect familiar patterns and respond to them in a particular way. Dialogflow from Google is a very good example of a FAQ chatbot building tool. The third one and perhaps the most famous one is an AI chatbot. Here, the user inputs the text of his choice, it can have spelling mistakes, grammatical mistakes or might have just references without being specific, the AI model still understands the message which the user is trying to pass on and responds appropriately. The response could be from its own training data or by browsing the internet. You can build the AI models yourself which usually takes a lot of time or use an already existing AI software like chatgpt, gemini, claude, perplexity, etc. So, the training part is already done for you here. So, I hope this article makes things a bit more clear when it comes to understanding chatbots and their types. If you are planning to deploy a chatbot for your website or application, you can connect with us on, info@azilora.com and we will suggest and build the right chatbot for you depending on your needs.