Month: July 2021

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What used to be a permanent lab entity just a few years back has found its way out of the machine rooms and entered different industries and business processes across the globe!

We are talking about conversational AI or what we call in the common language — a chatbot!

Recent research by the MIT Sloan Management Review and BCG suggests that more than 70% of the executives feel that AI is going to play a pivotal role in their business organizations.

The AI elements of chatbots are readily available for customization and as-is use in various business scenarios. However, the mammoth work of managing the data interplay, process complexities, and technology interfacing happen in-house!

The chatbot builders must have smart functionalities and a zero or slight learning curve for effortless and efficient usage.

Here, we share the best chatbot software for businesses in 2021, with more functionalities and less work.

What is a Chatbot?

A chatbot is a computer program that interacts with a user in natural language, understands their intent, and presents responses based on an organization’s data and business rules.

It is a natural language processor that comes with an in-built library of words, emotions, subjective and contextual processing, etc. It can interact with your customers intelligently and present responses to their queries like your agents.

Why Does Your Business Need Chatbots?

While the world of conversational AI offers an endless stream of benefits and business valuables, businesses with limited financial standing or with industry-best customer support and service systems already in place find it hard to place chatbot software in their business model.

Hence, we are going to focus on the core benefits of using smart chatbots that will make you identify them as a business must-have.

1. Innovation and Virtual Support

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a wake-up call for businesses running on traditional and redundant business models that have immense reliability on the “manual” and “physical” elements.

Chatbots emerge as an excellent tool for remote collaboration, 24X7 support 365 days a year, and an impressive agent for delivering borderline customer service. They never miss an incoming query, never fail to present multiple options as answers, and escalate in an impeccable manner.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. How Conversational AI can Automate Customer Service

2. Automated vs Live Chats: What will the Future of Customer Service Look Like?

3. Chatbots As Medical Assistants In COVID-19 Pandemic

4. Chatbot Vs. Intelligent Virtual Assistant — What’s the difference & Why Care?

2. Right answers at the right time

To err is human, but errors spark disinterest and frustration in customers already grappling with product malfunctions. A human agent can make several mistakes during his interaction with a customer, such as directing the call to an unavailable agent or offering an irrelevant response.

On the other hand, an automated bot software never makes any mistakes. This is because all their thinking and processing stems from an in-built library, and they just have to present the most relevant response.

3. Speed, flexibility, and convenience

Chatbot technology is second to nothing and no one when it comes to speed, flexibility, and convenience in the customer service sector. Interactive chatbots never sleep, never go on holidays, present quick replies, exhaustively gather all the preliminary information, and deliver excellent customer experiences.

The bots can also educate the customers about self-service resources and reduce the average expenses on a single customer interaction by 70%.

4. Less confusion and more work done

Chatbots can completely take over the frequently asked queries, basic queries and troubleshoot the basic technical problems as well. Hence, they free your agents for catering to important tasks and add synergistic value to your support system.

This brings us to the next question — what can you do with the chatbots?

What Can You Use Chatbots For?

You can use chat bot technology to add more value to your business in a consistent and sustained manner. They are the keys to unlock the digital journeys of your organization and deliver fantastic next-gen intelligent and delightful customer service.

Given below are the four key business areas you can use chatbots for.

• Improve customer acquisition

Cognitive and digital business capabilities are the need of the hour and showcasing them in your business model has a direct impact on your client acquisition.

As you can scale up and down rapidly, you are always able to acquire and serve new customers all the while ensuring that the existing ones are happy. The ready-to-use smart chat interface allows you to automate your support operations and achieve a higher degree of efficiency.

• Reduce churn

Your ability to deliver 24X7 support throughout the year without falling prey to the different time zones, allows you to achieve higher throughput and accuracy levels in customer support. Chatbots effectively solve their issues and offer high-quality support as and when required.

• Increase revenue generated per user

Your chatbots can take on the preliminary information collection and can offer personalized product and service recommendations. They can also deliver support based on gathering, processing, and acting upon the customer data.

Hence, they generate better ROI. They also allow your support agents to focus on more critical and pressing issues at work.

• Cost-cutting

Economies dwindling in the wake of uncertainties like the COVID-19 pandemic spurred stricter cost-cuttings. Customer service chatbots allow you to save 15% to 90% on your support expenses depending on the automation functionalities.

Other perks they offer include a short payback period, high potential ROI, mitigation of security risks, easy scaling, and low integration costs.

What are the Types of Chatbots?

Take a look at the following screenshot that shows the evolution of chatbots and their different types:

Based on the sectors they are employed in, core functionalities they have and libraries they use as their brains, there are different types of chatbots, that we discuss below.

When classified broadly, the chatbots are of the following three types:

1. FAQ Chatbot — Cater to FAQ type queries and present the most relevant answers
2. Virtual Agent — Smartest chatbots that can completely replace an employee
3. Virtual Assistant — Medium-level intelligence allows them to perform basic actions such as fetching personal information etc.

In relevance to customer support and wider applications, there are 6 types of chatting bots:

• Button or menu-based chatbots

These are the most basic customer service chatbots that are currently implemented on the majority of business websites. They have decision tree hierarchies that enable them to show different options to the customers. So, if your customers submit a query, they are shown a number of options to choose from and proceed with resolution.

They are mostly used for answering FAQs.

• Linguistics or rule-based chatbots

The rule-based chatbots are more advanced bots that are used to create conversational flows using if/then logic. These bots work on logic rules for processing customer queries in natural language. The definitions for language conditions are fed manually to the bot.

• Keyboard recognition-based bots

These bots can listen to your users and respond appropriately just like a human agent. They employ AI and NLP to serve smart responses and have intelligent conversations with your customers. However, they fail to perform when a lot of similar questions are asked.

• ML-based chatbots

The machine learning-based chatbots are highly advanced and can deliver contextual responses. They are also called context-aware bots. These bots can self-improve based on their interactions with the customers.

• Hybrid chatbots

The hybrid chatbots offer the mixed functionalities of AI-based bots and rule-based bots. They are also somewhat more affordable as compared to the top-notch software and are perfect for SMEs.

• Voice bots

The voice bots can take and deliver voice commands. They can also offer support in the vernacular or native language. Voice bots are extremely flexible, convenient, and frictionless bots.

How to Choose a Chatbot Solution?

By now you must have understood that identifying and choosing the rightmost and the best chatbot software for your business is a daunting task. The stakes and risk increase further when you don’t have the technical expertise to understand your chatbot requirements and customize an off-the-shelf software.

Hence, we are sharing the 3 key considerations for every buyer irrespective of the scale and type of business.

1.The scale of your business

Your business scale says a lot about your customer base, and having an average chatbot tool that delivers only the basic functionalities, is not the right fit for your business. NLP, AI, and ML are the operative words for large businesses when it comes to choosing a chatbot. While the enterprise-level business owners have more options because of their financial standing, the SMEs and start-ups have to be careful. They can opt for rule-based or contextual bots depending on their unique business needs and budget. The start-ups that are still in the nascent stages can surely make do without one.

2. Security concerns

A majority of chatbots run on the cloud that puts their security under the scanner. This becomes even more important when it comes to the businesses operating in the regulated domains such as finance, markets, and healthcare or government sector.

Identify your security concerns and compare them to the chatbots’ security compliances to ensure the safety of your organization.

3. Choosing the right capabilities

While choosing a top-notch chatbot platform might be on your mind, you must make the investment keeping your current business needs in mind. You can add more functionalities and scale your chatbots as your business grows, without much ado.

So, opt for the functionalities that are of key concern and address the major pain points in your support system.

Top 15 Chatbot Solutions for Your Website

For making your purchase decision easier, we are sharing the list of the best chatbot software for 2021 that you can choose without any second thoughts.

1. ProProfs ChatBot

ProProfs ChatBot allows you to build and configure chatbots that grow your business, and close more leads efficiently. You can automate your customer support and be online 24X7. The chatbot is easy to configure and allows for easy customization to suit your unique business needs. This is one of the best AI chatbots that interacts in a human-like manner and boosts conversions.

It can ask multiple-choice questions and open-ended questions and can be configured for different types of chatbot requirements, such as customer service bot, lead generation bot, and sales bot, etc.

Key Features:

• Ready-to-use template
• Reduces ticket volume by 35%
• Query escalation and routing
• Drag and drop editor
• Easy-to-use chatbot builder

Pricing: Plans start from $10/operator/month.

2. ManyChat

Manychat automates two-way interactions on various platforms, such as SMS, Messenger, Facebook, and Instagram, etc., and helps you steer your business towards growth. Built for sales and marketing, it is one of the best chatbots for businesses that operate in these domains. You can start with one of the many built-in templates that are beautiful, engaging, and can be configured in a few minutes.

It comes with an easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor that requires zero learning curve and offers easy integration with other existing tools in your software suite.

Key Features:

• Unlimited custom chatbot flows
• Target audience segmentation
• Automatic 2 message grip sequence
• Customer tagging
• Friendly user interface

Pricing: Paid plans start from $10/month and there is a free plan as well.

3. Dialogflow

Dialogflow is one of the best chatbot software, that is NLP-based and delivers smart and intuitive virtual agent functionalities. It is available in two editions — Dialogflow ES and Dialogflow CX.

It is powered by the leading AI from Google and is a comprehensive development platform for voice bots and chatbots. It can interact naturally and accurately with the customers. Further, it can be managed and scaled easily, as your business grows.

It is extremely easy to build and deploy chatbots universally. Just in case you are looking for a chatbot platform for large business enterprises, this is the best option.

Key Features:

• Visual flow builder
• Advanced AI
• Omnichannel implementation
• State-based data models
• Speech recognition

Pricing: Users have to pay monthly charges depending on the number of requests and editions

4. Chatfuel

Chatfuel is one of the best chatbot platforms for messenger that increases your sales, automates your customer support, and personalized marketing without any coding skills. It comes with an easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor and there is a free version as well that can be used for 5000 subscribers with almost every feature.

It also comes with a contact database, drip campaigns, and data import/export features that make it perfect as a chatbot for businesses of all types and all scales.

Chatfuel facilitates easier management and reuse of messages and offers many impressive data management and priority support features.

Key Features:

• AB Testing
• Canned responses
• File sharing
• Customer segmentation
• Content management

Pricing: Paid plans start from $15/month and there is a free plan as well.

5. TARS

No best chatbot software list is complete without the mention of TARS. It supports an efficient and intuitive drag-and-drop chatbot builder that allows you to create website chatbots as well as conversational landing pages. TARS comes with more than 800 in-built chatbot templates for different businesses and offers cases that can be customized and edited easily.

The bots created with TARS generate more leads and better ROI for your marketing efforts. It also comes with advanced analytics and marketing tools that allow you to draw actionable insights from customer data.

Key Features:

• Pre-Configured Bot
• Website Visitor Tracking
• Intent Recognition
• Reporting/Analytics
• Contextual Guidance

Pricing: Paid plans start from $499/month and there are no free plans.

6. SnatchBot

SnatchBot offers an omnichannel bot-building platform for developers and businesses and provides services for every stage in a bot lifecycle. It comes with impeccable administrative features and scalable enterprise-grade security levels. There is a comprehensive bot library with bot templates that you can customize and configure. SnatchBot employs NLP to create smart bots that interact like humans.

KeyFeatures:

• Robotic Process Automation
• Speech to text conversion
• Text to speech conversion
• Broadcasting
• Automatic speech recognition

Pricing: The paid plans start from $30/month, while there is a free plan as well.

7. SmartLoop

SmartLoop comes with a point-and-click conversation builder that allows you to build chatbots for various purposes, such as booking appointments, and lead qualification, etc. You can re-engage leads and drive sales via automated messages and perform a thorough analysis of the user conversation to understand what works best for them.

Based on this knowledge, you can automate the flow and create a fantastic support system with the perfect combination of AI and human agents.

Key Features:

• Intent Recognition
• Speech Recognition
• Pre-Configured Bot
• Live Chat
• Reporting/Analytics

Pricing: There is a free plan for 100 subscribers, while the paid plans start from $10/month.

8. Drift

Drift is yet another chatbot solution that improves customer experiences and helps businesses to automate their sales process. Often touted as the leading revenue acceleration platform in the world, Drift has a reputation for laying the foundation of conversational marketing and sales.

It is an impeccable chatbot for a website, and allows you to engage your website visitors with specific messages and interactions within the first few seconds of their visit and simulates human agent actions, such as meeting scheduling, sharing compelling content, and qualifying customer interests.

Key Features:

• Canned Responses
• Customer segmentation
• Contextual targeting
• Automated scheduling
• Analytics and ROI tracking

Pricing: Pricing is available on call and is done on a per-feature basis. There is a free version as well as a free plan also.

9. Tidio

Tidio is a smart and comprehensive communicator for businesses that keeps all the communications from chatbots, messengers, emails, and live chat in one place. Tidio offers a free chatbot app for websites and multiple other features that reduce time spent in customer interaction. It is a leading live chatbot for boosting customer engagement, all the while improving your sales figures.

What makes Tidio even better is the fact that it also comes with Android and iOS features for an on-the-go customer support experience.

Key Features:

• Feedback Management
• Complaint Monitoring
• Knowledge Base Management
• Proactive Chat and CRM
• Alerts / Escalation

Pricing: The paid plans start from $18/month, and there is a free plan as well.

10. Aivo

Aivo offers bots for businesses of all scales and all types and is one of the best chatbot software in the world. The AI-powered bots allow your business to offer real-time support via text as well as speech. You can set different rules for each channel and adapt them to present appropriate responses in an automated manner.

It runs on a powerful semantic engine that makes the interactions humanistic and more engaging.

Key Features:

• Interactive Content
• Personalization
• Speech Recognition
• Predictive Analytics
• Process/Workflow Automation

Pricing: The pricing starts from $99/month, and there is a 30-day free trial for the basic plan.

11. Pandorabots

Pandorabots is a name that wields reputation and respect in the domain by being one of the oldest and largest chatbot providers. Mitsuku chatbot is a milestone offering from the brand that has worked with many reputed names all over the world. Apart from full-fledged libraries, the tool comes with small talk libraries that cater to the chitchat interactions with a customer.

It is a context-aware, multilingual, and voice-enabled bot provider that ranks among the leading chatbot business operators and comes with coding as well as non-coding options for building and configuring bots.

Key Features:

• Rapid iteration
• Contextual knowledge
• Open platform standards
• Cross-channel bot
• Flexible and extensible for integrations

Pricing: There is a free plan with limited features, while the paid plans start from $19/month.

12. ItsAlive

ItsAlive is one of the best chatbot platforms for Facebook. It is a smart and intuitive Facebook chatbot builder that automates the FAQs and performs efficient escalation to the human agent as and when required. It can indulge in smart interactions with your customers within Facebook Messenger and evolves with these interactions.

Key Features:

• Multi-language
• Third-party integrations
• Reporting and analytics
• Bots work with keywords
• Automated responses

Pricing: There is a free plan with limited functionalities, while the paid plans start from $19/month.

13. Botsify

Botsify is another commendable chatbot platform that offers unified chat automation for businesses. You can connect the omnichannel live chat service with multiple platforms to set and configure the autoresponder. You can also build and use a website bot to engage your website visitor, increase your conversion rate. It allows you to get more qualified leads and has a faster response rate.

Key Features:

• Multiple chatbots
• Dedicated chatbot manager
• Analytics and reporting
• Conversational forms
• Unlimited chatbot users

Pricing: There is a 14-day free trial after which you have to pay $40/month for the basic plan.

14. MobileMonkey

MobileMonkey is a must-have in every best chatbot 2021 listing because of its powerful features and omnichannel bot functionalities. It works well across all the communication platforms, such as web chat, Facebook Messenger, SMS, and Instagram, etc. It comes with chat marketing, automation tools, and customer support features for digital agencies, creative businesses, and direct-to-consumer businesses.

It allows you to contact leads, communicate with the customers in real-time, and gain visibility into your customers via engagement analytics.

Key Features:

• Web forms
• Push Notifications
• Unified chat inbox
• Multi-platform chatbot builder
• Agency client management

Pricing: Pricing is available on call.

15. LivePerson

LivePerson is the world’s first conversation cloud that is AI-powered and comes with innovative and smart chatbot features, apart from a comprehensive conversation builder. You can build, customize and optimize the AI bots via the bot builder interface that comes with a little learning curve. Its intent manager allows you to understand what your customers actually want and enables better personalization.

Key Features:

• Sentiment analysis
• Pre-configured bot
• Customer segmentation
• Contextual guidance
• Collaboration tools

Pricing: The pricing is available on call, while there is a free trial as well.

Empower your Support Agents with the Best Technology: Choose the Best Chatbot Software

The modern business landscape is extremely competitive and spangled with customers with volatile interests and numerous other options other than your brand. Hence, if you wish to ace the support and service sector, you must create a superhuman support task force well-equipped with cutting-edge technology and industry-best software.

However, not all businesses have this kind of financial standing and chatbot requirements. That’s why we have compiled a highly inclusive list of chatbot software that you can refer to for making the best choice.

The criteria to choose the best customer service chatbot software vary across the businesses.

Hence, the best way to cultivate a perfectly balanced chatbot and humanistic support system requires a lot of thought. Start by identifying your unique business needs and perform a thorough chatbot platform comparison for picking the most relevant software.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

15 Best Chatbot Software in 2021 was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

While using a WhatsApp Business Number, there are two kinds of messages that you can use. If the customers you wish to message have interacted with your business number within the last 24 hours, you can send them session messages.

But, if those customers have not interacted with your WhatsApp Business number within the last 24 hours, you would need to send message templates to them.‍

What are WhatsApp message templates?

If you need to reach customers who have not interacted with your WhatsApp Business Number within the last 24 hours, message templates are exactly what you need. WhatsApp message templates are message formats pre-approved by WhatsApp and can be sent to customers who are not within the 24-hour window of having interacted with your business number.

You can leverage message templates to push out notifications, shipping information, payment updates, appointment reminders, etc.

The benefits of message templates

WhatsApp message templates have three significant advantages:

• They can be sent to customers who have crossed the time window of 24 hours since the last interaction.
• They can be sent to users who haven’t interacted with your business number yet.
• They can be used to display interactive buttons on WhatsApp.‍

Trending Bot Articles:

1. How Conversational AI can Automate Customer Service

2. Automated vs Live Chats: What will the Future of Customer Service Look Like?

3. Chatbots As Medical Assistants In COVID-19 Pandemic

4. Chatbot Vs. Intelligent Virtual Assistant — What’s the difference & Why Care?

How do you create message templates?

If you use an Engati WhatsApp chatbot via 360Dialog, you will need to sign into the 360Dialog Client Hub.

From the dashboard, select your WhatsApp Business Account and go to ‘Templates.’

Now you need to hit ‘Add Template’

Creating a WhatsApp message template

Give your template a name. It should only comprise lower case letters, numbers, and underscores.

Select the language that you want to use in your template. You’ll also need to choose the category that your template falls under. Here are your options:

• Auto Reply
• Account Update
• Payment Update
• Personal Finance Update
• Reservation Update
• Appointment Update
• Shipping Update
• Issue Resolution
• Transportation Update
• Ticket Update
• Alert Update

Now, choose whether you want a Standard (text only) or a Media Template.‍

1. Standard (text only) Templates

These will only have body sections. While writing your message content, you can add variables by using {{#}} as a placeholder. Your placeholders would look like {{1}}, {{2}}, etc.‍

2. Media Templates

These consist of a header, body, footer, and buttons.

Headers can be text, image, video, or document. Your body, like your footer, can only be text-based. Buttons can include Quick Reply buttons or Call to Action buttons. Call to Action buttons can be used to urge your customers to visit a website or call a phone number.

After creating your WhatsApp message template, you’ll need to submit it to WhatsApp for their approval. This can be done directly from the 360Dialog portal where the message template is created.

How do you send message templates?

There are two steps that you need to follow to execute and send your message templates.‍

1. Number validation

You’ll need to execute this API (copy this curl command and import it in Postman). Replace the API Key with your WhatsApp Business number’s API Key and use your recipients’ phone numbers in the “contacts” section.

Sample code:

curl — location — request POST ‘https://waba.360dialog.io/v1/contacts’

— header ‘D360-API-KEY: prD9dtBw7GNRsYVb1kuTgsMcnnAK’

— header ‘Content-Type: application/json’

— data-raw ‘{

“blocking”: “wait”,

“contacts”: [

“+917366879580”

],

“force_check”: true

} ‘

The response you receive will include a wa_id. You will need to use this wa_id in the “to” section of the Template API.

Sample response:

Number validation response

2. Template API execution

After getting the number validated, plug the wa_id into the “To” section of your template API and execute it. You can copy this curl command, replacing the sample namespace and text with your namespace and text.

curl — location — request POST ‘https://waba.360dialog.io/v1/messages’

— header ‘D360-API-KEY: prD9dtBw7GNRsYVb1kuTgsMcnnnAK’

— header ‘Content-Type: application/json’

— data-raw ‘{

“to”: “917366879580”,

“type”: “template”,

“template”: {

“namespace”: “b1529400_23d1_43ba_8a55_858f48b97annfb”,

“name”: “order”,

“language”: {

“code”: “en”,

“policy”: “deterministic”

},

“components”: [

{

“type”:”body”,

“parameters”:[{

“type”:”text”,

“text”:”test1″

},

{ “type”:”text”,

“text”:”test2″

},

{ “type”:”text”,

“text”:”test3″

},

{ “type”:”text”,

“text”:”test4″

},

{ “type”:”text”,

“text”:”test5″

}]

}]

}

}’

What are the parameters used for WhatsApp message templates?

• Template object
• Components object
• Parameters object
• HSM object
• Language object

‍

FAQs‍

1. Is there a limit on the number of template messages an account can have?

You have a maximum of 250 message templates for every WhatsApp Business account. Each of these templates can be translated into multiple languages and would still be counted as a single template.‍

2. Can you send message templates to anyone?

Yes, you can send WhatsApp message templates to any user with an active WhatsApp account, regardless of whether they have had prior interactions with your WhatsApp Business number.‍

3. Does WhatsApp approve all message templates?

WhatsApp usually approves message templates within 48 hours if the templates adhere to its guidelines. However, if your message template does not get approved, you will receive a reason and can revise and resubmit your message template for approval.

Update: Register now and get your WhatsApp number activated in 5 mins!

This article about “What is WhatsApp message templates and how can you use them?” was originally published in Engati blogs.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

What are WhatsApp message templates and how can you use them? was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Introduction

In a previous module, we examined language models and explored n-gram and neural approaches. We found that the n-gram approach is generally better for higher values of N but this may be constrained by available compute resources. There was also the concern about the lack of representation for n-grams not present in the training corpus. On the other hand, applying subword tokenization methods such as Byte Pair Encoding and Wordpiece, recent neural approaches are able to resolve the issues with n-gram language models and show impressive results.

We also traced the development of neural language models from feedforward networks that rely on word embeddings and fixed input length to recurrent neural networks which allowed for variable length input but struggled to capture long term dependencies. We explored the concept of attention and their importance in transformer models using Jay Alammar’s awesome The Illustrated Transformer. We learned that transformer models have the benefit of being parallelizable during training.

Building on our knowledge of transformer models, we explored OpenAI’s GPT-2 which has 1.5 billion parameters and was trained on 40GB of text — wow! Then, Microsoft’s DialoGPT which extends this language model to conversational response generation.

All these provide context for this article. Here, we will play around with the pretrained DialoGPT model and generate responses using a variety of strategies.

Loading the DialoGPT model

Microsoft makes variants of the pretrained DialoGPT model checkpoints available through a download link listed in the GitHub repository and through Hugging Face’s Transformers. 🤗Transformers library offers a unified API through which a lot of models can be loaded, trained, saved and shared so we will use that here.

A tqdm download starts when you run this code as 🤗Transformers downloads and caches the checkpoints for the model and tokenizer. Do not worry, this download only occurs the first time a particular model/tokenizer is loaded. When this completes, we should see a 12-layer model with an embedding dimension of 768. We can interact with this model just as we interact with pytorch models. For example, we can check the number of parameters in the DialoGPT-small model.

If you would prefer to interact with a Tensorflow model, simply import TFGPT2LMHeadModel instead.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. How Conversational AI can Automate Customer Service

2. Automated vs Live Chats: What will the Future of Customer Service Look Like?

3. Chatbots As Medical Assistants In COVID-19 Pandemic

4. Chatbot Vs. Intelligent Virtual Assistant — What’s the difference & Why Care?

Chatting with DialoGPT

To interact with the model we loaded, we have to prompt the model with text. We must tokenize this text in a fashion that the model understands. To do this, we use the tokenizer we loaded earlier. We will also use the tokenizer to process the output of the model in order to obtain our response. We can write a simple function to handle all this neatly, taking advantage of 🤗Transformers’ generate method

So that we can focus on just the parameters passed to our model, we can bind the model and tokenizer using partial. Then, we can prompt our model.

from functools import partial

generator = partial(generate, model=model, tokenizer=tokenizer)

generator(“Try this cake. I baked it myself.”)

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — 
Output
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — 

Setting `pad_token_id` to `eos_token_id`:50256 for open-end generation.

[“I’m not sure if I’m missing something,”]

There are two other things to pay attention to about our generate function. First, we switch the model to evaluation mode. This is necessary because of layers that behave differently during training and inference e.g. dropout layers. Secondly, we only decode a part of history_ids which our model returns. This is because the text we prompted our model with is also returned. We can confirm this by decoding all of history_ids. Try it out!

Decoding Strategies

We have already demonstrated one strategy for decoding above. Our generate function as used above employs Greedy Search. During generation, the greedy search algorithm simply selects the word/token with the highest probability as the model’s next output during generation.

Source: How to generate text: using different decoding methods for language generation with Transformers | Patrick von Platen

Following the image above, the algorithm generates “The nice woman” by choosing the most probable word at each turn. Prompt the model with different contexts to get a feel for the kind of responses it generates.

1. Beam Search

We may quickly discover that greedy search often produces generic responses. Consider the scenario below (Source: Decoding Strategies that You Need to Know for Response Generation | Vitou Phy)

Context: Try this cake. I baked it myself.

Optimal response: This tastes great!

Model response: This is okay.

The model generates a suboptimal response even though it starts with the same token as the optimal response — “This”. This may happen because ‘is’ is a more popular token following ‘That’ in the training data. To speak in terms of probabilities, a more probable sequence may be ‘hiding’ behind a low-probability token. Referring to the tree diagram above as an example, “The dog has” (0.36) has a higher probability than “The nice woman” (0.2).

Beam search circumvents this issue by tracking a predefined number of most likely tokens at each step before eventually choosing the sequence with the highest probability. We can employ beam search using our `generate` function as follows

generate(

     “Would you like to have dinner with me?”,

     num_beams=5,

     early_stopping=True,

     num_return_sequences=5

)

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — 
Output
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — 

[‘How did you make it?’,

‘I baked it myself.’,

‘How did you make this?’,

‘How did you make the cake?’,

‘I baked it myself’]

These responses are great. We can improve them by conditioning our search. no_repeat_ngram_size ensures that n-grams already generated are not repeated in the model’s response later on. min_length and max_length ensure that the generated responses have lengths within a predefined range. We can also retrieve more than one sequence by setting num_return_sequences to a value less than or equal to num_beams.

generator(

     “Try this cake. I baked it myself.”,

      max_length=50,

      num_beams=5,

      early_stopping=True,

      no_repeat_ngram_size=2,

      min_length=25,

      num_return_sequences=5

)

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — 
Output
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

[‘How did you make the cake? I want to make one too!!’,

‘How did you make the cake? I want to make one too! :D’,

‘How did you make the cake? I want to make one myself!!’,

‘How did you make the cake? I want to make one too. It looks amazing!’,

‘How did you make the cake? I want to make one too. It looks amazing.’]

Now, these responses feel a lot more natural. However, striking a balance between all these penalties we have imposed may require some tuning.

2. Random Sampling

Thinking about human conversations, there’s quite a bit of unpredictability. We do not simply choose the most likely word or sentence in reply to a friend. We can introduce this randomness by sampling. Thus, we select the next token using a conditional probability distribution.

import torch

torch.manual_seed(42)

generator(

    “Try this cake. I baked it myself.”,

     do_sample=True,

     top_k=0,

     max_length=50

)
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — Output
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — 

[‘Surely it was caused by some sort of cake’]

We set top_k to zero for now. We will visit Top-K sampling next.

The response is truly more surprising than others so far. It’s also not very coherent. It is unclear how baking a cake was “surely caused some sort of sake”. We can improve this if we reduce the likelihood of low probability words using the softmax temperature.

generator(

   “Try this cake. I baked it myself.”,

   do_sample=True, 

   top_k=0,

   max_length=50,

   temperature=0.7

)

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — 
Output
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

[“Can you post the recipe? I’m really interested in trying it.”]

Now, we obtain a response that connects better with what the model was prompted with. However, random sampling sometimes generates errors. Fan et al. (2018) pointed out that for words like can’t which is tokenized to ca and n’t, the model may produce the first token but miss the second. Random sampling may also affect the generation of longer text as sampling interrupts the coherence across consecutive sentences.

3. Top-K Sampling

This strategy is employed by GPT2 and it improves story generation. The K most likely next words are filtered and become the sampling pool. This ensures that unexpected tokens are not sampled and improves the generation of the model.

generator(

  “Try this cake. I baked it myself.”,

  do_sample=True,

  top_k=50,

  max_length=50)

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — 
Output
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — 

[“I had to google what a dutch oven is because i couldn’t figure it out. I’m not the expert. Who knew?”]

This response sounds even more natural than the response we obtained by random sampling.

4. Nucleus Sampling

Top-k sampling focuses on sampling amongst a defined K number of potential tokens. However, the probability distribution of the next word may vary from sharp distributions (left side of the image below) to flatter ones.

Source: How to generate text: using different decoding methods for language generation with Transformers | Patrick von Platen

When dealing with sharper distributions, top-k sampling may introduce tokens into the sampling pool that affect the naturalness of the sentence generated. Holtzman et al. (2019) introduced Nucleus/Top-P Sampling where the model chooses from the smallest possible set of words with cumulative probability exceeding a predefined value, p.

We can generate using this strategy as follows

generator(

   “Try this cake. I baked it myself.”,

   do_sample=True,

   top_p=0.9,

   top_k=0,

   max_length=50

)

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — 
Output
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

[‘Then my work here is done.’]

Conclusion

That’s it! We’ve examined four important strategies you can use to generate text and what to watch out for when working with each one. Still, this is an open research area so it is best to experiment with them all and decide which works best for your use case.

Resources

1. Colab Notebook
2. Hierarchical Neural Story Generation | Fan et al. (2018)
3. The Curious Case of Text Degeneration | Holtzman et al. (2019)

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

Conversing with chatbots: DialoGPT was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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Did your employee of the year work around the clock or never took sick leave without fail? No, right? Operating 365 days with no breaks sounds next to impossible, but we have a new candidate who successfully offers the above and much more. Chatbots are the new favorite employee of every company. Chatbot training is gaining traction in today’s marketplace due to the drastic shift from product-centric to customer-centric services. Chatbot programming is focused on making the customer experience hassle-free, quick, and satisfying. In this article, we will talk about the top marketing chatbot trends worth checking out.

TOP MARKETING TRENDS

Listed below are some marketing trends that you don’t want to miss out on in 2021.

1. More AI Integration

The AI chatbot builds better relationships with customers by providing tailored services that lead to a satisfied customer base and boost customer loyalty. They use natural language processing and machine learning algorithms which makes them sentimental and more human-like. In today’s fast-paced world, where people want everything within a split second, AI bots are the correct fix.

Let us explain this with an example; earlier travel applications only allowed you to book your accommodation, but syncing it with AI travel bots has enabled features like updating you with the happening places nearby, weather updates, and shopping centers. These chatbot experts can even learn from their interactions and upskill themselves with time.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. How Conversational AI can Automate Customer Service

2. Automated vs Live Chats: What will the Future of Customer Service Look Like?

3. Chatbots As Medical Assistants In COVID-19 Pandemic

4. Chatbot Vs. Intelligent Virtual Assistant — What’s the difference & Why Care?

2. Shift Towards Voice Bots

Are you also dependent on Alexa to wake you up, remind you about important meetings, or suggest a song for your current mood? If not, then you’re missing out on quite a lot. Texting can sometimes be a tedious job, whereas voice is the most effortless and faster communication form. Voice bots not only make the conversion easy and natural but also more engaging and personalized. Thanks to voice bots, users don’t have to call only during business hours or stand in long queues to speak with a service agent. Companies are adding voice bots to their checklists, with the new generation demanding fast services and lesser human interaction.

3. Transactional Bots

Transactional bots can be an excellent replacement for talking to an actual person or using complex interfaces and switching between multiple tabs, thus saving time and effort. They can help sell products while conversing with a bot that answers your queries without testing your patience while also recommending products that meet your requirements.

Let us look at a few examples-

• Domino’s bot can reorder a customer’s previous order, saving them from the monotonous steps of placing an order and making a payment.
• Many people rely on Facebook Messenger to prevent credit or debit card security issues; these bots do not fail to gain your trust and make the payment process a walk in the park for you.
• Everyone’s go-to coffee chain Starbucks uses chatbot training for sales and marketing by suggesting beverages based on previous customer behavior, regular updates about the seasonal drinks, and helps in processing their orders.

4. Messaging Platforms

Platforms use messaging chatbots for marketing their services to increase brand awareness and customer engagement. Let us understand this trend better by looking at the initiative taken by The World Health Organisation during the Covid-19 outbreak wherein providing reliable information around the world daily was an essential task. As a result of which WHO started using the Whatsapp bot named ‘WHO Health Alert.’ This chatbot gives out real-time information about symptoms, vaccinations, and travel advisory. Lately, many small brands and startups have also been using messaging platforms to scale their businesses as it is pocket-friendly and a great way to keep their customer base involved.

5. Streamlining Internal Services

Chatbots are continuing to efficiently streamline customer care, HR, and many other functions. It goes unsaid that every company wants to reduce its customer service costs by introducing conversational bots. Given below are some sectors where chatbots are overtaking human services –

• Human Resource

HR chatbots have drastically reduced the time recruiting teams spend on screening candidates. These chatbots handle all the standard questions and respond with a customized message because of the advanced chatbot programming. These chatbots can also act as an internal help desk to respond to queries and complete HR transactional services.

• Customer Care Centre

Bots can quickly reduce the number of human agents required at a call center, decrease waiting time, accelerate customer service, and boost customer satisfaction. Hiring individuals for a 24-hour service can be pretty expensive. On the other hand, these chatbot experts can efficiently work around the clock without digging a hole in your pocket. By providing real-time feedback on customer responses and analyzing call data to improve overall performance, AI is reconstructing the modern call center.

Chatbot trends in 2021 are opening new frontiers and progressing their way into our day-to-day lives, making our lives easier.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

Top Marketing Chatbot Trends To Explore In 2021 was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When it comes to marketing, you probably do not think about Spotify — a music streaming platform that is used by over 100 million people. We think Spotify Advertising Campaigns are underrated considering the high potential they have.

Whether you’re considering it for your radio broadcast or an advertising campaign, Spotify will undoubtedly have a very positive effect on your marketing campaign efforts.

In addition to audio ads, Spotify also offers display ads and video ads. If you’re considering a more budget-conscious marketing strategy, advertising on Spotify could be the perfect fit. With so many people using Spotify globally, it’s a great time to switch up your advertising budget.

We’ll look at how it works, and why you should consider effectively promoting your brand on Spotify by using voice applications.

Why choose Spotify Advertising Campaigns?

Considering that Spotify in the first quarter of 2021 registered nearly 200 million free users, it is enough reason to consider it for advertisement. We mentioned free users since they are the ones targeted from Spotify Advertising Campaigns.

As for total users by region, Spotify has provided this data about the Q1 2021:

These details instead are the data about the Q4 2020:

• Europe, 121 million
• North America, 83 million
• Latin America, 76 million
• rest of world, 66 million

Trending Bot Articles:

1. How Conversational AI can Automate Customer Service

2. Automated vs Live Chats: What will the Future of Customer Service Look Like?

3. Chatbots As Medical Assistants In COVID-19 Pandemic

4. Chatbot Vs. Intelligent Virtual Assistant — What’s the difference & Why Care?

Spotify + Voice Apps = Voice Marketing

As promised at the beginning of this article, the tool that is going to help you create the ultimate Spotify advertisement campaign is voice applications. And this is why!

Just using Spotify for a marketing campaign can generate a lot of brand awareness and a high number of leads.

However, not everything goes as we plan it. This is where voice applications can successfully close the interaction in your favor.

Using platforms like Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant, you can create customized voice applications that can further engage the user into the conversation. This conversation will later create a more personal connection with the user. Therefore increasing the chances of them turning into leads, and later on into customers.

Here we enter into the Voice Marketing space. It is a method proven to generate more conversions and a more positive user experience.

How to create better performing Spotify Advertising Campaigns with Voice Applications?

Before going into the actual steps you will need to take, it is important to specify something. The way voice applications can enhance Spotify advertisement campaigns is by taking the audience from a listening position to a conversational activity. It makes the experience unique and pleasing for the user.

The first step is to create an Alexa Skill and/or a Google Action.

By doing so, the user who listens to your audio ad on Spotify won’t need to go to a website or a landing page. Even if this is a possible route, doing so will only decrease the chances of taking the user to the final step.

However, you should consider these factors when creating them:

• Alexa Skills are accessible through all Amazon Echo devices and through the smartphone app for Alexa. The user has an entirely voice-driven experience that simplifies every step without having them stop what they are already doing. Echo devices can be used in homes, cars, and offices. This makes it possible to engage your audience wherever they are.
• Google Actions on the other side can probably generate more leads depending on the product/service you are offering. With Google Assistant being by default the voice assistant for every android smartphone it will be even easier for users to engage with your Google Action. They can access it everywhere, through their smartphone, even when far from a Google Home or Google Nest device.

When creating the voice application there are certain key features to evaluate:

1. The wake-word of your Alexa Skill/Google Action: The wake-word needs to be easy to remember and related to the service/product you have to offer. It is the phrase the user will say to its voice assistant to enable the voice app. Also, a brand-related naming will make it easier for the listener to create a general idea of what you are offering. You have to consider you will have only 15–30 seconds of the Spotify audio/image/video ad.

2. Taking care of the Customer Journey: After attracting the right audience with the Spotify audio Ad, the only thing that separates you from a new lead or a sale is the customer journey. It starts with the user activating your voice application and ends with him registering to or buying your product/service. You will need to estimate the steps the user will need to take while maintaining the interaction level simple. Also, you need to study the question you will ask the user and the data you may ask to collect.

3. Voice design: Behind every successful voice application is a great voice user experience design. Depending on what your purpose is, it will impact the voice design. It will guide how the conversations are built, how the questions are made, and what the user will need to do to conclude the deal. Here it is also important to develop the content based on your brand’s tone of voice for a more personalized experience.

Next step: creating the Spotify advertisement campaign

Spotify’s self-serve advertising platform, Ad Studio, makes it easy for businesses to get discovered and reach millions of listeners with their message. With cost-effective advertising available for every budget, it gets even easier to launch your own advertising campaign. You can run a campaign for as little as $250 and start reaching your desired audience.

• The first thing you will need to do is to sign up for an Ad Studio account. If you don’t have an account, you can create it here.

• Now you can start by specifying your target audience by demographic, location, interests, and activity targeting. These specs can be modified in mid-campaign if needed.

• Next, you will need to start creating the advertisement. You can use Spotify’s free creative services, which makes it easy to produce professional audio ads. Or, you can upload your own content. In this stage, it’s important that, besides the offer made to the listener, you include the wake word for your voice app. Here you can invite them to activate it for a better deal, a special offer, or maybe a further discount on the product/service.

• Once the ad has been launched, you will be able to follow its progress in real-time, check its delivery, performance, and audience reach. Also, you will be able to further optimize the campaign to reach your goals.

With Ad Studio, you can start small with as little as $250. Spotify also offers tips about how to write effective ads and free tools to create great ads from scratch.

For larger budgets, they offer ad campaigns developed specifically for you. Pricing is determined based on several factors, including your country, your audience, the creative and other features of the campaign.

Our own experience

Before advising this method to others, we decided to try it ourselves first. The objective of the campaign was to verify the difference in the performance when integrating it with a voice application. The campaign was run on Spotify but with the possibility of a “web link” available for comparison. The objective of the campaign was to invite the listeners to enable a voice application called “ Caccia i Ladri “. It was meant for the Italian market, specifically for the Milan area.

For a deeper insight, we run two different audio ads of 20 seconds each. One invited the listeners to enable the above-mentioned Alexa Skill on their Echo devices. The other invited them to enable the above-mentioned Google Action on their smartphones using Google Assistant.

Both campaigns remained active for 3 days during the weekend and the budget used was € 250.

Here are the results:

Of the 41,000 passive listeners on the Alexa campaign, 214 vocally activated the Voice App asking “Alexa, open Caccia i Ladri” for a VTR (Voice Through Rate) of 0,52%. But only those who had in their immediate vicinity an Amazon Echo Smart Speaker with Alexa. Also, 339 passive listeners followed the Web-link reaching a CTR of 0,81%.

Of the 38,000 passive listeners on the Google campaign, 112 vocally activated the Voice App by asking “Ok Google, ask Caccia i Ladri”. It brought a VTR (Voice Through Rate) of 0.30%. In this case, 458 passive listeners followed the Web-link reaching a CTR of 1,20%.

Key takeaways

Using voice applications like Alexa Skills or Google Actions is not just a way to create conversations with new customers. It can help increase the performance of your marketing campaign, even on Spotify. Therefore, generating more leads and a higher ROI.

Voice Apps offer something more apart from Spotify Advertisements’ potential to increase your brand recognition and awareness. Through the personalized and unique experience the user will undergo, it will create new customers faster while increasing your brand reputation.

What makes the difference?

Spotify will allow you to add a link to redirect the interested users, but most of those who will listen to the ad might not take such action. It comes not only because of the extra effort the user will need to dedicate and the time needed. They will have to interrupt what they are doing to do so. Also, 15–30 seconds of audio do not give all the time needed to properly convince the audience.

With voice applications, on the other hand, they will have a much easier route to take to learn more about what you are offering. They can keep doing the same thing they were doing before and simply ask their voice assistant to activate the voice application. Once they enable the voice app, here you can better engage them, learn more about them, and generate more data.

Using a voice application can also help you generate more data about user’s behavior, their interests, and their doubts. All of this generated through the conversation developed through the user and your brand.
In case you are already interested in using this method or don’t know how to integrate the voice application with Spotify advertising campaigns, Ipervox can help you.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

How to build the Best Performing Spotify Advertising Campaigns with Voice Applications was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

nlu: - intent: place_order examples: | - wanna [large](size) shoes for husky - need a [small](size) size [green](color) boots for pupps - have [blue](color) socks - would like to place an order - lookup: size examples: | - small -medium -large - synonym: small examples: | - small - s - tiny - synonym: large examples: | - large - l - big - synonym: medium examples: | - medium - m - average - normal - lookup: color examples: | - black - blue - white - red - green - orange - yellow - purple 

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