Category: Chat

To Learn More on Computer Vision and AI visit www.augmentedstartups.com

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What is Computer Vision? was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What sets your business apart from the competition in the market? Superior products? A greater variety of products? Faster delivery? While these are all important factors, the one factor that will keep your business in the minds of your customers is how you made them feel before, during, and most importantly, after the purchase has been made.

In other words, your customer experience has to be top-notch, and this is where AI chatbots come in.

Chatbots not only make your business more efficient, but they also help in delivering a customer experience that will leave a positive impression of your brand. Also, customers these days don’t mind speaking to a chatbot, according to Small Biz Genius’s report, which says that as long as the bot is prompt in its response, over 63% of the users will interact with it.

So how do you build a chatbot for your website? Well, that part is easy. You follow a few simple steps on how to build a chatbot that we put together.

But then, there are other questions like:

• Which chatbot builder do you choose?
• How much does implementing a chatbot on your website cost you?
• What are the features that you should consider?
• How important is the UI of the chatbot builder platform?

We answer all these questions in this article and offer you a lot more.

We don’t want to keep you waiting, so let’s dive right in.

1. Kommunicate

Kicking things off in this list is the one chatbot solution that we can describe the best since we have been building and testing it for quite a while. Kommunicate is a customer support automation platform helping you build live chat and chatbots for your website.

Traditional customer service needs a serious overhaul, and Kommunicate envisions a solution to this problem using a human + chatbot hybrid model. Kommunicate’s Kompose chatbot builder uses a simple block builder to build your conversations.

You can build a fully functioning chatbot in a matter of minutes with Kommunicate. What’s more, as you are building your bot, you can see a preview of it on the right-hand side.

You can test your bot as you are building it, which is a great feature to have. Kommunicate also scores heavily on the AI & NLP features, where you can understand the intent of the user by adding keywords. Kommunicate provides integrations with AI systems such as DialogFlow, IBM Watson, and Amazon Lex.

The impressive list of integrations also extends to CMS systems such as WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix, CRM systems such as Zendesk, Pipedrive, and AgileCRM, and E-commerce platforms such as Shopify, Magento, Prestashop, etc.

Kommunicate also integrates well with messaging platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Line, and Telegram. Use automation to manually resolve dormant conversations, automatically hand-off conversations to humans in case the bot is unable to answer a question, and do a lot more with Kommunicate.

What we like about Kommunicate:

• Kompose bot builder: Easy-to-use bot builder that lets you build a chatbot in a matter of minutes. It cannot get simpler than this!!
• An impressive list of integrations.
• Stellar customer support, available to you over the phone, email, and live chat, along with detailed documentation.

Kommunicate pricing:

• Start: $40/month for 1000 Monthly Tracked Unique Users (MTU). Includes two teammates.
• Grow: $100/month for up to 5000 MTU. Includes five teammates.
• Scale: $400/month for up to 10,000 MTU, includes ten teammates.
• Business: Contact our sales team for more details of our plan.

For a detailed overview of Kommunicate’s pricing, visit our pricing page here.

2. Kuki aka Mitsuku

One of the simplest chatbots when it comes to signing up, Mitsuku, aka Kuki, is an AI chatbot that is primarily here to entertain and not do any serious heavy lifting like the other bots on our list. But does that make Mitsuku a “simple” chatbot? Most certainly not. Mitsuku won the Loebner prize four times in the last decade alone.

What is, or rather was, the Loebner Prize? The Loebner Prize was an annual competition in AI that judged bots on how closely they could mimic a human conversation. We took Mitsuku for a spin, and we have to say, the bot was a delight to talk to.

Mitsuku uses the A.L.I.C.E (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) and is built on the A.I.M.L (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language), and has more than 80 billion messages in its huge message log. This enables the chatbot to respond to any question asked.

What we liked:

• Super easy to sign up and use.
• The chatbot responded to a lot of our queries and was able to gauge the emotion of the user accurately most of the time.
• Multi-platform compatibility.

3. Bot Penguin

There are a lot of no-code bot builder platforms on the list here, and Bot Penguin is one such chatbot builder where you can quickly build chatbots, primarily aimed at lead generation. You can train Bot Penguin’s bots based on different target use cases. These use cases can vary from answering FAQs to lead generation, scheduling meetings, and even handling the sales counter.

Powered by Natural Language Processing (NLP), the bots powered by Bot Penguin can carry out conversations with users almost as a human would. Bot Penguin also comes with an agent chat interface where the agents can quickly take over a conversation as and when required.

What we liked:

• Chat window on Facebook Messenger. This makes it a lot easier for the users to monitor their social media traffic.
• CRM Integrations: Bot Penguin seamlessly integrates with a host of popular CRM solutions, including ZOHO, Hubspot, and Salesforce. This means you don’t have to enter the leads manually into your CRM.
• Pricing: To create a single bot, Bot Penguin charges you nothing. Even if you are going with the King plan at $5/ month, which gives you access to unlimited bots, it still works out as a value for money.

Bot Penguin Pricing

• Free Plan: Free of charge. One bot and 2000 messages/ month.
• King Plan: $4.17 per month. Unlimited bots and 3000 to 500,000 messages/month.
• Emperor Plan: Should contact sales for price. Unlimited bots and messages.

4. Chatfuel

How easy is it to build a chatbot? There are several players out there in the market that claim to be truly codeless, and they are. But what sets Chatfuel apart is how easy they actually make it to build your own little chatbot. We were able to get up and running by building a chatbot using Chatfuel in less than 15 minutes, and even people who are unfamiliar with building bots can get up and running in a few clicks.

Chatfuel has a really clean interface, which is one of the key reasons businesses have been supporting it since 2015, when Facebook launched its Messenger API. You can use either the Visual Flow Builder or the Block Builder to build your bots using Chatfuel. Each block in the block builder represents a chatbot element, and you can combine different blocks to form “Sequences.”

What we really liked:

• Chatfuel interface: Minimal, clean, and very well designed, Chatfuel has left no stone unturned when it comes to providing a robust user interface. Every section in the dashboard is assigned to a specific purpose, which leaves you with a very good customer experience.
• Different options to suit different customer needs: Chatfuel comes with an advanced level of personalization, having all the features of a chatbot. Keyword detection, automation choices, and the Chatfuel bot lets you build powerful bots that can go into different conversational pathways.
• Affordability: Chatfuel is one of the most affordable chatbot platforms available in the market compared to all the other bot builders on our list. The pricing details have been mentioned below, and, as you can see, they are not so heavy on your wallet.

Chatfuel Pricing:

• Trial Plan: Up to 50 free conversations for $0
• Entrepreneur Plan: Up to 500 conversations for $15/month
• Startup Plan: Up to 1000 conversations for $25/month.

5. Tidio

If you are someone who is just starting out with chatbots, having no previous experience coding or building one, then we highly recommend Tidio.

Tidio calls itself an “all in one, powerful, customer service tool,” and we found that it delivered on many of the promises it made. Setting up Tidio is super easy. You just provide the basic information and select from one of the 21 languages available on the dashboard.

In the next step, Tidio will ask you if you want to offer a discount to a new visitor and greet them with a welcome message, and once that is done, you are good to go. The dashboard is simple enough to navigate through, and Tidio lets you easily set “offline hours” when you are no longer available for business.

You can customize the look and feel of the bot in a few simple clicks from the “Channels” tab in the dashboard and can place the bot anywhere on your screen. Tidio also lets you connect your Facebook Business page to your Tidio account in a matter of a few clicks.

What we really liked about Tidio

• User interface: Tidio offers a simple and intuitive interface and is especially useful if you are a first-time chatbot builder. They start out by asking a few basic questions, like “ Ask them if they’d like to order a phone call,” or “Just greet them warmly.”. The visual bot builder is also a breeze to use.
• Features: Tidio has a huge list of features, including a Live Visitors List, Customer Support Metrics, Live Typing, Canned Responses, Viewed Responses, and Notes, among others. Some of these features are only available with the advanced plans, though.
• Integrations: Tidio has an impressive list of Integrations, including ones with Zendesk, Mailchimp, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Zapier, Google Analytics, and Hubspot, among others.

Tidio pricing

Tidio has four plans for its users, including”

• Free: $0 /month, includes two operators.
• Starter: $32.5 /month, includes three operators
• Team: $65.83/month, includes five operators
• Scale: $332.5/month, includes unlimited operators

6. Botsify

Botsify is a fully-managed, AI-powered chatbot platform that lets you build powerful chatbots for specific use-cases. Claiming to have more than 4 million users and an impressive 83k bots built to date, this chatbot solution is popular among businesses of all sizes. Botsify provides different types of templates for different industries, such as travel bots or sales bots.

Instead of blocks, chatbots here operate in the form of “stories,” and you can teach your bot to respond to queries that your customers might potentially have. More and more of these stories lead you to build story trees, and you can easily make changes to these trees from the user interface.

Botsify offers bot creation capabilities for a wide array of services, including messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, SMS, WhiteLabel, and also Website chatbot.

What we like about Botsify:

• Ease of bot creation: The UI may not be as polished as some of the other bot platforms that we are featuring on this list, but Botsify makes it super easy to create a bot.
• Collection of templates: Botsify lets you choose from a predefined list of over 24 chatbot templates, and this lets you customize your bot to a very high degree.
• Impressive analytics: Botsify’s chatbot analytics are quite impressive. You can have a real-time look at various metrics such as the bot with the most conversions, bots having the most conversational hours, etc.

Botsify pricing:

• Free plan: 14-day free trial with unlimited chatbot users, analytics and reporting, and a dedicated account manager.
• Do It Yourself: Plan starts at $49/month and gives you access to 2 chatbots and up to 5000 users per month.
• Done for You: This plan starts at $149/month and gives you access to 5 chatbots and up to 15,000 users per month.

7. Aivo

Aivo markets itself as a customer service solution that gives you quick solutions, lets you manage your own time, . It also provides personalized answers to all your queries. Aivo has divided its offerings into three umbrellas — AgentBot, Engage and Live.

AgentBot is the conversational AI offering of Aivo that lets you grab the audience’s attention. How? With personalized ads, measure customer satisfaction, and evolve using customers’ experience on the site.

Engage lets you create WhatsApp campaigns. Without any code, you can drive high-quality conversations with customers at scale. This helps you craft effective marketing campaigns.

Live lets you add agents to your conversations with the customer and resolve complex customer queries in real-time. With Live, agents can offer more optimal solutions to customers in less time and also create customized customer support groups.

What we liked about Aivo:

• Detailed analytics: Aivo comes with an agent monitor where you can see the details of each ongoing conversation. There is also a chat report which allows you to analyze the service content and quality.
• Open to feedback: Aivo is always open to receiving constructive feedback and implementing them in its products. This has been re-iterated in multiple reviews online and customer testimonials.

Aivo pricing:

• Starter: $75/month plus an additional $0.18 per conversation. The starter plan includes features such as specialized CX analytics and unlimited live chat agents.
• Advanced: $479/month plus an additional $0.15 per conversation. The advanced plan all the features of the starter plan and additional features such as conditional automation rules and satisfaction measurement.
• Business and Enterprise Plans: To get more information about these plans, you need to contact Aivo’s sales team. You can do so by visiting their pricing page here.

8. Pandorabots

The name Pandorabots might be familiar to you if you have been reading through this entire list, and it should be since these are the people behind Kuki/Mitsuku, which we profiled earlier. Pandorabots is an open-source chatbot framework with which you can build AI-powered chatbots for the web, mobile applications, and messaging apps like Slack and WhatsApp. Pandorabots is based on AIML(Artificial Intelligence Markup Language), which you can use to create sleek, conversational bots.

The “Chat Design” feature lets you visually create the questions and answers for your chatbot. There is, however, a minor catch when it comes to designing your chatbot flows. During this design, it is important to handle context, which may not be possible if you don’t know how to code in AIML. Thus, creating a good chatbot in Pandorabots requires you to have a firm grasp of AIML. The conversations in Pandorabots are always initiated by the user, which is a drawback. Also, chatbots built using Pandorabots cannot handle multiple languages at the same time.

What we liked about Pandorabots:

• Easy-to-use interface, Pandorabots provides both a visual editor for marketers and a code-based editor for hardcore developers.
• Open-source framework, which means you can play around with the code of your chatbot. Really useful for those interested in customization.
• Ability to understand the intent of the user and reply to it accordingly.

Pricing of Pandorabots

• Free plan: Free of charge, no access to API or third-party channels.
• Developer plan: $19/month for 10,000 channel messages/ month and only Email support.
• Pro Plan: $199/month for 100,000 channel messages/month, with Email, chat, and phone support.
• Enterprise plan: Varies according to users.

9. Manychat

If you want a chatbot builder that is tailored to meet your customers on Instagram, Facebook Messenger, or SMS, then you might want to check out ManyChat. Manychat boasts of some very impressive features such as message broadcasting, drip messaging, A/B testing, etc. The chatbot platform’s user interface is quite sleek, with a dashboard that is super easy to use. There are two kinds of interfaces for building bots using Manychat — The Basic Builder and The Flow Builder.

The Basic Builder presents all the messages of a certain flow are organized and presented in a predefined order. This makes it easy to keep all your bot messages organized. The Flow Builder is more of a visual drag-and-drop bot builder that lets you connect your messages and actions with each other. This can get tricky if you have a lot of incoming content for your bot, but Manychat allows you to switch to Basic Bot builder any time while building the bot. With ManyChat, you can easily ask questions and save the user’s response to a custom field. Using this, you can send broadcast messages to specific user segments.

What we liked about Manychat

• Audience tab: This gives an overview of all the users who have interacted with your chatbot, which is really useful for your sales team when they make cold calls.
• Well-organized Sequences: The sequences in ManyChat are very well organized, and you can see the entire sequence in one overview window. You can also see which sequence is sent out at which particular time, which is a neat feature to have.
• Built-in live-chat integration.

Manychat pricing

• Free plan: $0 charged, access to over 1000 contacts, and can collaborate with 1 team member.
• Pro plan: $15/month, access to unlimited contacts, and can collaborate with unlimited team members.

10. WATI

If your customers are primarily on WhatsApp, then WATI is a solution that you should really keep on your shopping list. With WATI, you can set up a WhatsApp chatbot without writing a single line of code in a matter of minutes. WATI also lets you automate nurture sequences. This is an important marketing automation feature to have, considering the fact that WhatsApp messages have over 90% open rates. Another neat feature that WATI offers is Broadcast Messages. This comes with a catch, though, since you need to have an approved template before you send out a Broadcast message.

Broadcast messages on WhatsApp also come with interesting analytics, and you can see the details of your message like Sent, Opened, Read, Replied, Failed, etc., just like an email. WATI has integrations with E-Commerce platforms such as WooCommerce and Shopify, and they are adding more integrations as we make this list. WATI also has tools to assist your sales team, such as Cart Recovery. Now, if a customer has filled out their phone number while purchasing an item before dropping off, you can use WATI to remind them of their purchase. WATI also integrates with CRM such as Zoho, Hubspot, and Zapier.

What we liked about WATI

• Automated review of template messages.
• The ease with which you can send customers notifications over WhatsApp.
• Reports like how many people received messages and how many did not.

WATI pricing

• Monthly plan: $49/month, which includes 1000 free conversations and five agents.
• Annual plan: $40/month, which includes 1000 free conversations and five agents.

11. Chatbot.com

One of the oldest players in the market, Chatbot.com, is an all-in-one platform that can be used to build chatbots across multiple platforms. The interface of Chatbot.com is a visual drag and drop builder, which we have seen across many players that we have reviewed in this list. Each of the chatbot elements is called Interactions, and a single Story can have an endless number of interactions. Although the Flow builder makes it easy to build chatbots, it can also get a lot complicated if you are building large chatbots.

This is where Chatbot.com excels by providing access to additional Flows. When you click on a new Flow, it opens a new window, and you can start building your bot from here. Chatbot.com also gives you a standard “Test your Bot” feature, with an add-on that is quite interesting. You can start testing the bot from any random spot on the flow by clicking on the “Start testing from here.” option. Chatbot.com also provides decent analytics, where you can see all the users who have interacted with your bot. You can see details such as the customer’s time zone, the channel they used, their email address, and even add custom fields.

What we liked about Chatbot.com

• Flow builder is so easy-to-use that you can be up and running with a bot in a few minutes.
• Ability to store user info into custom fields.
• Training section where you can see the phrases that your chatbot did not understand and then teach them to your bot.

Chatbot.com pricing

• Starter: $50/month for 1 active chatbot and 1000 valid chats/month.
• Team: $149/month for 5 active chatbots and 5000 valid chats/month.
• Business: $499/month for unlimited active chatbots and up to 25,000 valid chats/month.
• Enterprise: Contact chatbot.com here to know more.

12. Hubspot

The name Hubspot is synonymous with Inbound marketing, marketing automation, and, of course, awesome content. In fact, it was Hubspot’s co-founder Brian Halligan who coined the term “Inbound Marketing” way back in 2005. But did you know that Hubspot also builds chatbots? In 2017, Hubspot acquired the company Motion AI and has been building bots since then, calling it Conversations. Hubspot also uses a visual chat builder, and there are four kinds of bots that you can build using Hubspot: Instant Reply Bots, Qualify Leads Bot, Book meetings bot, and Support bot.

When you click on one of these bot types, a chatflow is made with corresponding messages. Before your chatflow goes live, Hubspot also gives you an option to test it on Facebook Messenger. Hubspot does not give you the ability to send broadcasts or sequences, which can be seen as a major drawback. Hubspot chatbot does not provide any analytics options, and neither does it have any eCommerce integrations. With all this information, it looks like Hubspot just decided to offer a chatbot solution as an “add-on” and not as a serious tool to enhance your business capabilities.

What we liked about Hubspot chatbot:

• Easy-to-use interface if you are already used to the Hubspot interface.
• Livechat integration, along with other important integrations such as Integromat, Webhooks, and Zapier.
• Ability to make a chatbot in any language.

Hubspot chatbot pricing

• Hubspot has a free trial version and then the starter plan at $45/month, although this price is for the entire Marketing CRM suite and not just the chatbot solution. The other pricing plans are also according to Hubspot plans.

13. Giosg

Giosg calls itself a Conversational Marketing Software that is designed to serve agencies and SMEs, helping increase conversion rates by a significant amount.

These bots can also be used to automate your support and sales functions. Giosg provides an impressive list of ready-to-use templates, including ones for FAQ bots, Demo bots, etc. Giosg uses an advanced Machine Learning (ML) Engine to learn and process the chat messages of users. It then stores them in a Knowledge Base and uses them to give meaningful replies to users’ queries.

One of the major use-cases of Giosg is lead generation bots, which are known to be 4x more effective than static lead generation forms. The chatbot platform also integrates with your favorite CRM and marketing automation software, such as Hubspot, Zapier, Zendesk, Salesforce, etc., among others. In addition to these integrations, Giosg also has an open API which means further integrations, and building on top of Giosg is pretty straightforward.

What we liked about Giosg:

A Knowledge base of responses that you can use to train your bot. You can use historical data and talk to the customers naturally using them.

• An impressive list of integrations.
• Real-time metrics that show you how many conversations the AI has automated.

Giosg pricing

• Starter: €249 /month, which includes Live chat for one user and integrations with Facebook Messenger and Zapier.
• Business: €459 /month, which includes everything in the Starter plan and access to the Full Template Library.
• Enterprise: Details of this plan vary based on the user, and you can find out more here.

14. MobileMonkey

The last chatbot platform on our list comes recommended by none other than Neil Patel! MobileMonkey can be used to build chatbots primarily for websites but also for Facebook Messenger, Instagram and SMS. The chatbot flows in MobileMonkey are called “Dialogues,” and the elements that are presented to the users are called “Widgets.” MobileMonkey does not have a visual drag-and-drop Visual Flow Builder, which is a small hiccup. This is because if you have several options for your chat flow, these Widgets will get stacked under each other, and you can’t get a clear overview of the bots you are building.

The way leads are presented in MobileMonkey is quite good, and once you click on a lead, it will display all the requisite details such as “Last Seen” and “Email address.” Moreover, you can store users’ responses in custom fields and then use these custom fields to create user segments. This helps in creating broadcast sequences. With MobileMonkey, you can also create a chatbot in a language of your choice. However, you cannot translate your chatbot to different languages.MobileMonkey provides good analytics with total contacts, daily contacts, and sessions, unanswered questions, and triggered keywords. There are also a total of 23 templates that you can use, all of which are free.

What we liked about MobileMonkey:

• A large number of pre-built ready-to-use templates.
• Omnichannel widget. This marketing tool shows a Facebook Messenger widget when a user is logged in and a native website widget when a user is logged out.
• Ability to analyse the questions to which the chatbot couldn’t respond with an answer. With this, you can improve the chatbot by providing relevant answers.

Pricing:

• Instachamp VIP Edition: Free plan, includes 250 contacts and 10 MobileMonkey branding-free sends.
• Instachamp platinum: $9.95/month, includes 1000 contacts and 500 MobileMonkey branding-free sends.
• MobileMonkey Startup edition: $119/month, includes 3000 contacts and 1000 MobileMonkey branding-free sends.

And there you have it. Fourteen of the top chatbot builders profiled according to their strengths and weaknesses.

We had a tough time deciding which is the best one among these that suits your business. This is because each use case is different, and while some had good integrations, others provided good analytics options.

At the end of the day, we would recommend going with a chatbot provider who gives you an all-rounded solution that gives you maximum value for your money; we would recommend Kommunicate.

Originally Published on https://www.kommunicate.io/ 09/06/2022.

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Top 14 AI Chatbot Platforms for Business [2022 edition] was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Let’s talk money.

Because you probably read it everywhere — Chatbots are great for lead generation. Chatbots are very cost-effective.

And you’re convinced of their usefulness.

But are you really sold?

Not until you get the answer to the most prominent question you have as a decision-maker — “How much money do I need to spend?”

Well, the answer is — it depends.

The point is, if you want a chatbot solution, you can even get it for free today. But it won’t be right for you if it doesn’t have the features or solutions that your company seeks. Or if the solution isn’t aligned with your vision. Or if it doesn’t address your use case.

So naturally, a lot of factors should be considered when you talk about chatbot costing.

It’s necessary for you to have a holistic outlook of –

• What are the chatbot pricing plans ‌you should know about?
• What are the crucial factors you should consider?
• Are chatbots worth the investment?

Let’s talk about these topics in detail.

What are the types of Chatbot Pricing Models?

The chatbot market has evolved over the years. It has birthed new chatbot pricing models based on the features and other add-ons that a business might need in their chatbot. Fortunately, you’ll find numerous options and you can pick one based on your business needs and sizes. These pricing plans are:

1. Free Chatbot

A lot of vendors offer chatbot software for free. This is perfect if you’re a new business with a limited team and budget, and looking to get acquainted with the technology. A free chatbot will help you evaluate the tool, understand how to leverage its basic features, build the conversation flow, and optimize the bot. Remember that a free plan differs from a free trial which is offered just for a limited time frame.

Only after you reach a point of awareness can you move forward and decide whether you want to purchase the product or continue using it for free. A free plan, for example, that of WotNot’s, includes features such as the bot-builder, analytics dashboard, and limited integrations.

Some top free chatbot providers in the market include:

Since this is a free plan, there’ll be a limit on the number of conversations you can have, the number of agent accounts you can have, custom integrations you can have, and so on. But it works best for a pilot project where you can check how the software works for you.

2. Subscription chatbots

A free plan can only offer so much. Subscription chatbot pricing delivers more features that are useful for you to ramp up automated conversations on all your platforms. The type of subscription pricing includes:

Affordable pricing

Many chatbot providers offer affordable pricing plans that start at $15 and can go up to $99 per month. This would be ideal if you are a small business with a limited team or fewer than 100 employees. You’ll also have comparatively more features at your disposal. Some examples of affordable pricing include:

Mid-market pricing

As your business grows, you need to keep up with the demands and influx of growing customers through automation. Your chatbot will need features that allow you to provide automated conversations at scale along with advanced integrations.

Mid-market pricing works best when you have a team of around 500 employees and are looking to streamline complex customer transactions and conversations. Some chatbot platforms you can consider are:

3. Enterprise chatbots

Enterprise chatbots include all the features and additional customizations that an enterprise seeks in their tools. This type of pricing usually applies to large enterprises having over 500 employees.

The pricing depends on the extent of customization required by the enterprise. The vendors and enterprises get in touch via a live demo and come to a pricing conclusion based on the custom requirements of the enterprise.

Enterprise plans typically include features of all the pricing plans and a few advanced ones. In addition to that, you can choose to customize your chatbot based on your business requirements.

Some top players in the market and the advanced features they offer in their enterprise plans include:

What are the costs involved in purchasing a chatbot?

Chatbot vendors often include extra costs that range from licensing fees to third-party usage costs. For example, with enterprise pricing, you’re paying a lot more than just features and integrations.

Let’s ‌look at these costs ‌for you to have a comprehensive understanding of the pricing plans:

1. License Costs

Any time an enterprise incorporates a new tool, ensuring privacy is a top concern. And while chatbot brings immense value to businesses, business owners have legitimate concerns about the security, storage of the data collected through chatbots, its protection, and accessibility.

According to a study by Accenture, 45% of businesses are hesitant about implementing chatbots because of uncertain exposure to new privacy, security, legal, and regulatory aspects.

As a result, chatbot vendors often include license costs. These costs are those that provide legally binding guidelines for the use, distribution, and installing the chatbot software on the client’s server. By paying for the license costs, the client mitigates the risks associated with data privacy and prevents hacking and phishing attacks.

2. Installation Costs

With a license, costs come installation costs. This is the one-time fee that you would need to pay the vendor for an on-premise installation. Think of installation costs as the costs associated with installing an app on your phone or desktop.

By paying installation costs, you are waiving off the costs you’ll otherwise incur in hiring in-house developers to get a fully customized chatbot up and running on your platforms.

3. Chatbot Software Platform Costs

This is the basic subscription fee that you pay for using the chatbot platform. This would depend on the platform you choose and the inclusions in each pricing plan.

Most chatbot platforms follow the freemium pricing method, where users have access to free plans and acquire premium features by paying for them.

For instance, WotNot’s pricing structure is divided into:

• Free plan
• Startup plan
• Business plan
• Enterprise plan

4. Conversation Design Costs

Since chatbot is a marketing tool, it’s essential to understand the nuances of chatbot conversations, chatbot marketing techniques, and ways to leverage the script to have valuable outcomes from the same.

If you opt for a business or enterprise plan, you can rely on the chatbot vendors for designing and scripting the chatbot. These costs are allocated towards hiring a graphic designer and a creative content writer who can understand your business objectives and create the creative content for your chatbot flow.

Here is an example of how a chatbot can handle multiple kinds of conversational flows for a financial company that deals with mutual funds.

5. Chatbot Development Costs

Along with someone creative, you need someone with the technical know-how as well — someone who can implement the output of the conversation designer. A chatbot developer is responsible for building and deploying the bot on multiple platforms.

This chatbot development cost can range from $500 to $2500.

Chatbot developers have a good understanding of what works best in every platform and clone the bots based on the platform specifications. The services of a chatbot developer are essential to optimize your bot, handle minor tweaks, and ensure seamless deployments.

6. Custom Integration Costs

Your chatbot platform may already provide some custom integrations but say, a company is using a custom CRM software or a live chat system that requires custom integration. In that case, these integrations are charged on a time and material model. With these additional integrations, the overall solution will be more advanced and personalized to your needs.

7. Ongoing Support and Maintenance Costs

You pick any tool — the work doesn’t end once it’s up and running.

The tool constantly evolves to accommodate additional requests or updates for better functioning.

For example, you check the chatbot analysis and conclude that the conversations are abandoned at a particular question. As a result, the chatbot agency would have to change the flow to ensure the completion of the conversation. These are called the support and maintenance costs.

You can only predict these costs once you see the bot in action for a few months. You’ll realize when you need an AI chatbot, or an FAQ builder, and have to request these integrations from the chatbot provider. The cost could either be a part of the subscription fee as a feature where the customer gets 10 hours of support each month or it could be an add-on.

8. Usage Costs

Usage costs include any additional charges that you pay to a third party. This can include the costs of a WhatsApp business API, SMS costs, NLP engine costs, etc.

For example, if you want to deploy a bot on WhatsApp, you’ll need to work with an official WhatsApp business solution provider that will help you access the API. They offer around 10000 messages free per month. However, they’ll charge you extra if you exceed the plan limit. You will have to incur the set-up costs and cost-per-conversation (which usually varies based on different regions and providers).

Factors that Determine the Chatbot Costs

Now that you have an overview of how chatbots are priced, you need to figure out how you should decide on the costs to pay. To do so, ask the following questions before deciding:

What is your Business Goal?

Your business goal won’t just decide your chatbot pricing but also your use case, the type of bot you require, and the channels you want to cover. So ultimately, it all boils down to one simple question, “why the need for a chatbot?”. Most businesses aim to achieve the following long-term outcomes from a chatbot:

• Increased automation in key tasks
• Higher site conversions
• Increased sales
• Higher customer engagement
• Reduced operational costs

You can have more than one end goal but this clarity will help you draft a pilot project for your chatbot and also decide how much investment you should allot and the ROI you should expect.

Identifying these goals will decide the features you’ll need, platforms you should consider for deployment, and integrations that will be beneficial.

What is your use case?

Not every chatbot you see can achieve the same outcome. They are designed for specific use cases that can range from demand generation to customer support. As mentioned above, your use case will be determined by your business goal.

For example, if your goal is to increase sales, you would need to invest in a lead generation chatbot. If your goal is to save operational costs, you will need a customer support chatbot.

Your use cases will define the flow and integrations that will eventually decide the costs associated with your chatbot. Some of the most common use cases of a chatbot that you might want to consider are:

• Demand Generation Chatbot
• Appointment Scheduling Chatbot
• Product Recommendation Chatbot
• Order Placing Chatbot

What type of Bot do You Require?

While the function of every chatbot is driven by the need to drive conversations on websites, the way they achieve their goals is different. There are different kinds of chatbots having varied costs.

Rule-based Chatbots

Think of a rule-based chatbot as a decision tree formulated in the form of conversation. Rule-based chatbots have a predetermined flow. The user is made to choose an option to take the conversation further so that it doesn’t deviate from the flow or the rules assigned to each question.

AI Chatbot

An AI chatbot possesses machine learning capabilities and is programmed via an NLP (Natural Language Processing) engine. AI chatbot converses with users by understanding the intent of the question and provides answers based on the intent. With time, AI chatbots get better at recognizing the intent and learn to give out accurate answers to customer queries.

Hybrid Chatbot

It’s unnecessary for your chatbot to be rule-based or an AI chatbot. It can be a combination of both. Rule-based and AI chatbots are at different ends of the spectrum. Hybrid chatbots are a way to combine them to leverage the benefits of both.

Such chatbots have some rule-based tasks and an understanding of intent and context. It allows you to add AI elements only where you require them.

You must wonder, “that’s great, but how does this affect my pricing?”

Here’s the deal: Rule-based chatbots are straightforward and don’t require any NLP engines or the expertise to build and deploy chatbots on your website. But like we mentioned the usage costs above, what makes chatbots ‘AI’ is their NLP engine integration like Dialogflow or IBM Watson.

These NLP engines often have extra costs associated with them that you’ll have to consider, and the costs of talent hired to build them. For example, IBM Watson charges $0.0025 per API call in its standard plan.

So naturally, if you decide to go for an AI chatbot, then you’ll have to pay 2–3 times higher than the rule-based chatbot.

How complex is the flow to build this chatbot?

Although we discussed the reasoning behind why AI chatbots are expensive, we cannot assume that all rule-based chatbots will be affordable. It takes considerable effort to build a rule-based chatbot as well. Especially if it involves a long conversation flow that ensures that the conversation is engaging throughout and leads to a desirable outcome.

It will take a creative writer several hours and expertise to build a highly engaging chatbot along with drafting a compelling chatbot copy that sounds natural and humane.

This leaves us with a rather simple conclusion: the longer and more complex the flow, the costlier the solution.

What is Your Budget?

Even if your business needs an AI chatbot or a complex chatbot flow, you cannot have it if you don’t have the budget for it. Most times, the management may be reluctant to invest in new technology and have a legitimate fear of not getting the expected ROI.

But the best part about the plans that we discussed so far is that there’s a lot of flexibility in pricing options. There’s a chatbot plan for every budget from $0 to $1000.

If you have a minimal to nil budget, you can always opt for a free plan or a basic plan that gives you access to just the critical features. It is also a great way to get started with a chatbot tool. You can use it and measure its progress so that you can ultimately pitch to ask for a higher bid from the management.

After using the tool and scaling up your business, if your budget increases marginally, you can opt for a business plan that is inclusive of almost all the features you would need in a chatbot.

What Channels Do You Want to Cover?

A lot of businesses want to establish a presence on popular platforms and connect with customers on messaging apps they use. If you’re deploying a bot on a website or Facebook, you don’t have to incur any additional costs.

However, going back to the usage costs, deploying a bot on WhatsApp or SMS will cost you extra, which is payable to third-party vendors.

If we take the example of WhatsApp, you first need to avail an API from a WhatsApp business solution provider like Twilio or 360dialog.

For WhatsApp, in the USA, Twilio doesn’t charge for the first 1000 conversations each month and then charges a $0.005 flat fee per interaction (period of 25 hours). Similarly, businesses can send an SMS to a local number for $0.0079. The pricing changes for each country and API providers.

What is the Cost of the Workforce?

By now, you must’ve realized the importance of location when deciding your chatbot cost. The country where you get your chatbot developed will largely affect the chatbot pricing, primarily because of the differences in hourly wages.

In the US, an employee will cost you around $50/hour. Now consider all the talent that goes into building a chatbot — the developers, the marketers, the writers, and the designers. A chatbot solution in the US can be expensive, whereas you can pay three times less and get the same solution from a country in Eastern Europe or India where an employee will cost you less than $25/hour.

What is the Volume of Conversations that the Chatbot will Automate?

Any brand that wants to implement chatbots can expect an increase in conversation volume capability. Since chatbots work on the SaaS model, the more conversations they handle, the more server power the chatbot platform needs to have. This volume largely depends on your website and social media traffic.

The pricing plans will typically have an upper limit on the number of chats. Based on your current support volume, you need to figure out how much will be diverted towards chatbots and how many requests are they expected to handle. It will help you figure out your chat volume. If your chatbot capacity needs to be scaled to accommodate a higher volume, the cost will shoot up accordingly.

What Integrations do you Require?

Integrations are a bare necessity for chatbots. If you build a scheduling chatbot, you’ll need a scheduling tool integration like Calendly, or if you build a lead generation chatbot, you need a CRM integration like Salesforce.

It is the interconnectivity between these tools that makes your chatbot solution comprehensive. Approximately, the cost of an integration can vary from $1000 to $10,000. These prices depend on the complexity and level of customization needed to integrate a tool into the chatbot which will add to your costs.

Chatbot Cost-Benefit Analysis

Finally, the moment you’ve been waiting for. The moment of understanding if chatbots are even worth the hassle.

Research suggests that chatbots answer over 80% of the standard queries and save up to $2–5 per interaction. For example, if your chatbot handles 10k chats per month, you save around $50k per month. If it handles more than 20k chats per month, you approximately save $100k per month, and so on.

You already know how chatbots could potentially be beneficial. But you also need to understand the extent to which they’re beneficial in your scenario, albeit with your budget and business goals.

A cost-benefit analysis will help you decide if you really need a chatbot and how much money you should invest in the tool.

So to understand if they can add value to your business, identify the following metrics:

Estimate the Queries that can be Automated

Your agents are at the front line, speaking to your potential customers regularly. Get to know more about the repetitive queries they come across. For example, a mid-size real estate agency can come across numerous questions about their new projects, like:

Once you understand the most common questions that prospects have, categorize them into the level of support they need. Some inquiries require first-level support and some require speaking with a live agent.

In our example, a real estate chatbot can automate most answers like showcasing the latest projects and their amenities with carousels, adding location details with maps, etc. Apart from pricing, the bot takes care of all the straightforward answers. This means that 4 out of the 5 most common questions (80%) of the queries can be answered via a chatbot.

Estimate the Current Time Spent on Answering Inquiries

Continuing with our example, let’s say an agent spent an average of 15 minutes of call duration explaining every basic and minute detail of the project. As chatbots can take over 80% of the load, the average call duration can decrease to 3–4 minutes.

The decreased time would help your agents be more productive and be available for more important calls where they can nurture the leads, talk about pricing, schedule appointments for property viewings, etc. It will also eliminate their mundaneness and allow them to address only queries that actually require their attention.

Calculate the Annual Cost of Handling Inquiries

Your real estate agents are completing a 15-minute call in 4 minutes.

Now consider that they have eight-hour shifts, out of which they spent five hours on calls. With chatbots, your agents are saving up to four hours every day. Not only does this reduce dependency on your workforce but also allows you to be available 24*7, which wasn’t possible before. It also affects the wage you pay annually.

For example, if your agent works for $25/hour for 20 hours a week, you’re paying them $19, 200 annually.

On the other hand, WotNot offers a business plan at $499 per month, which comes down to around $6000 annually.

As for your agents, they can concentrate on other valuable demand generation activities instead which can increase your sales.

According to research, chatbot automation can lead to $23 billion in savings from annual salaries.

Calculate the Business Value Generated

Chatbots don’t just save costs, they generate business value as well. Since chatbots increase conversion rates, they increase the number of hot leads that can be directly passed on to agents.

According to a study by Forbes, chatbots increase sales by 67%. You can calculate your lead generation by determining the lead-to-chat ratio for both manual and estimated automated leads generated via chatbots. You can then compare the two to see the accurate business value generated.

The lead value for a B2B company is usually $2000-$10,000, depending on the industry. So if your chatbot generates 500 leads per month, it means that $100K to $500K in the pipeline is directly attributed to the bot.

Key Takeaways

A chatbot can cost you anything from $0 to $5000 per month. The pricing is usually divided into a free plan, start-up plan, business plan, and enterprise plan.

Before deciding on the pricing, ensure that you consider all the factors mentioned below:

Calculate a cost-benefit analysis of the tool to get a better understanding of how the chatbot will bear fruits for your business.

Evaluate the results and choose a plan that gives you the highest ROI.

Finishing Thoughts

It suffices to say that there’s no one answer to the question, “how much does a chatbot cost?” Numerous players offer diverse plans based on business sizes and requirements. It’s easy to fall into the notion that automation always means good. It won’t help you if you go out of your budget to install a solution that your business doesn’t even need. So it’s your job to assess your needs and figure out how you can best leverage the tool.

While investing in a new tool can always seem intimidating and a gamble, you can always find a way out by signing up for a free plan. You can sign up on WotNot and determine your feature and integration requirements as you use it.

FAQs

Are chatbots cost-effective?

Yes. Chatbots answer over 80% of the standard queries and save up to $0.07 per interaction. Chatbots automate key tasks and reduces the dependency on agents for mundane tasks such as lead generation and first-level support queries. It saves time and costs of hiring employees for a 24*7 service and helps you scale your customer conversations without hiring an extra workforce.

How is chatbot value calculated?

You can simply compare the number of queries handled by a bot with the current costs spent on answering simple queries. You also estimate the value your bot generates by estimating the extra lead value you can gain from chatbots with the bot installation costs or your subscription costs.

How much time does it take to build a chatbot?

It depends on the complexity of the flow, and the integrations needed. But considering everything, you can build and deploy a bot anytime between 2–8 weeks.

Are chatbots free?

Yes, you can get a free chatbot on WotNot. You can build unlimited bots and get access to the no-code bot builder, live chat, analytics dashboard, and chatbot templates in the free plan.

How much does a WhatsApp chatbot cost?

While downloading WhatsApp is free, it is the WhatsApp Business API for which you will have to pay extra to a WhatsApp Business solution provider. WhatsApp Business API price is now conversation-based. This means WhatsApp now charges businesses per conversation rather than per notification. You can expect a cost of $0.005 flat fee per message sent to the USA.

Originally published at https://wotnot.io.

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Everything you Need to Know About Chatbot Pricing in 2022 was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Alexa team demoed the new feature during the event by presenting a scenario in which Alexa uses the voice of a dead grandmother to read a bedtime story to a little boy

Dale John Wong — Alexa will soon be able to talk using a loved one’s voice (even if they’re dead)

That quote from a recent article builds on the digital resurrection post from June 14th. When they say anyone’s voice — they mean it. Take a look at the video below starting at the 1:01:58 mark, which is a different application of the same scenario — resurrecting a lost loved one. If you have not already responded to the poll below, please provide your thoughts.

(36) Amazon re:MARS 2022 — Day 2 — Keynote — YouTube

Originally published at http://frankdiana.net on June 27, 2022.

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Alexa Can Mimic Anyone’s Voice was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

With WhatsApp expanding its capabilities and scope, it is evolving as a platform for conversational commerce, giving rise to the concept of WhatsApp commerce — offering and selling products and services to customers using WhatsApp as the primary channel. This development poses a massive opportunity for Insurance brands to leverage. Now, they can simplify the complex process of buying, renewing, or claiming policies by having simple conversations with their customers on their preferred communication channel.

We spoke to Sushant Khairnar (Head-Digital Transformation, Kotak Life) and Swati Mishra (Strategic Partnerships, WhatsApp) to understand how Insurance brands can reap the benefits of WhatsApp commerce.

You can watch the complete on-demand webinar here or continue to read a summary of the main takeaways discussed.

In this no holds barred candid discussion, the panelists deep dived into the following topics and more:

• How insurance brands can power an end-to-end buying journey on WhatsApp
• Use of marketing notifications to nudge customers
• Providing personalized buying assistance to customers
• Handling agent onboard, support & engagement
• Key commerce use cases for Insurance

Powering an end-to-end buying journey on WhatsApp

The typical purchase journey for an insurance customer would involve going through multiple web pages filled with text and technical terms. But WhatsApp commerce, with its recent introduction of features and UI elements, is empowering brands to make this entire process a lot simpler and more conversational for their customers. Sushant Khairnar talked about how very few Life Insurance companies have a customer-facing app. And even they were contemplating on having one. But when they saw the pickup on the WhatsApp channel in the initial months, they decided that WhatsApp would play the role of a customer-facing app for Kotak Life.

Here are some critical pointers to help brands begin their conversations on the world’s largest messaging app:

• The first and most crucial aspect to consider is driving visibility and discovery. WhatsApp has made it highly flexible for brands to get customer opt-ins. Practically, brands can use every communication channel to get customer opt-ins, e.g., SMS, website, social media, telephone, etc.
• By deploying a WhatsApp chatbot solution, brands can streamline and automate processes like collecting information, answering queries, providing policy information, document collection, follow-ups, etc.
• Brands can also deliver a frictionless payment collection process on WhatsApp for their customers without them having to navigate between multiple apps.

Use of marketing notifications to nudge customers

People want to hear from their favorite brands in more ways across the customer journey. Earlier, businesses were only allowed to send transactional notifications like order updates, appointment reminders, and account information. But recently, WhatsApp has allowed brands to send marketing notifications , in other words, non-transactional messages. This move is a game-changer for insurance brands since it enables them to proactively engage with their customers at each stage of their buying journey. According to the panelists, the marketing notifications are poised to deliver more results than other forms of brand-related outreach. They are capable of fetching better ROI than Emails and SMSes.

Here is an example of how marketing notifications can be helpful:

Insurance companies can get on-the-spot policy renewal acceptance from their customers by sending policy renewal quotes. They can also direct them to the website to complete the entire renewal process.

Providing personalized buying assistance to customers

Insurance is a serious and complex subject. Customers require constant support like detailed information while evaluating multiple options, making inquiries about their policies, or filing claims. And Swati Mishra believes that AI can play a critical role in meeting this demand; it can enable brands to deliver tailored experiences according to customer preferences. It can also help brands decide which products to bundle together for cross-selling opportunities.

When powered with an AI-recommendation engine like Haptik’s, an insurance chatbot can serve as a virtual insurance advisor for customers. Simulating the behavior of a human insurance agent, it can engage the customer in a conversation and ask them questions to understand their needs and expectations. It can then offer them personalized policy recommendations, help them compare two or more plans, and assist them in getting a clearer understanding of policy options by answering any follow-up questions.

Handling agent onboard, support & engagement

The panelists talked about how life insurance brands offer technical products requiring human intervention to understand their features and benefits. They also stated that long-tail queries can also become a challenge. In that case, a handover to a relevant channel can help customers get the desired support.

With the chatbot automating routine mechanical tasks, insurance agents can solve more complex customer issues and have more meaningful interactions with current or prospective customers. Insurance chatbots also help enrich agent interactions with customers by gathering data about the customer’s intent, requirements, risk profile, etc., providing the agent with more context about what the customer wants.

Key WhatsApp commerce use cases for Insurance

1. Automation of lead generation and qualification process

Building a solid sales pipeline is essential for growing any business. With the help of a WhatsApp chatbot, the lead generation and qualification process can be made seamless. While interacting with prospective customers, the insurance WhatsApp chatbot can collect critical information: contact details, monthly income, premium paying ability, etc.

As the customer provides all these details in an engaging conversational way, rather than filling a long static lead form, the chances of drop-offs get reduced. When routed to agents, the collected data about the customers’ intent and requirements can help them have more meaningful interactions, leading to higher conversions.

Kotak life has been using WhatsApp chatbot for lead generation and seeing a good lift. The percentage of conversions through WhatsApp for the brand is at par with their other performing sources.

2. Policy information and recommendations

Offering customers not just general information but concrete recommendations through chatbot increases the likelihood of the customers exploring the purchase further. Also, with an insurance WhatsApp chatbot available 24/7, insurance companies can guide customers at every stage without waiting for a sales or customer care representative. The chatbot can answer basic customer questions about plans, premiums, coverage, etc.

3. Follow-up with leads

Many leads get lost because customers become unresponsive or forget to share the required documents. The open rate of WhatsApp is more than 90% which makes it an excellent channel for follow-ups. And now, with the advent of WhatsApp’s marketing notifications, it has become even easier to nudge customers towards the desired action; e.g., if the customer hasn’t sent the documents, the WhatsApp chatbot can send a reminder message.

4. Document submission

One of the central pain point areas for insurance companies when onboarding customers for any service is the collection of documents like income slips, address proofs, ID proof, medical statements, etc. WhatsApp makes it extremely easy; the customer has to just scan the documents and share them. And that’s why our experts urge brands to leverage WhatsApp’s inherent rich-media capabilities. According to them, they are powerful when used for the right use-cases.

To sum up

The world has changed and digitized more than anyone could have imagined in the last couple of years. Today, businesses focus on meeting the customers where they already are rather than pulling them to specific platforms where they want them to. And looking at the sheer scale, it is evident that WhatsApp is the channel for brands to be. According to Sushant Khairnar, WhatsApp is more than a channel; it is a habit, and that’s why it sees a pull from the customer’s side. With the expansion of WhatsApp’s commerce capabilities, it is emerging as the most efficient channel to buy and sell digitally.

Are you looking to leverage the full potential of WhatsApp Commerce?

GET IN TOUCH

Originally published at https://www.haptik.ai on February 25, 2022.

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WhatsApp Commerce for Insurance: Key Takeaways From Our Webinar was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There are many things to consider when planning curriculum, assessments, and teaching and learning culture.

We’ve discussed the importance of online course design, just-in-time learning, flipped learning, and more. Today, we will be exploring the importance of student retention, particularly in higher education.

The Echo Show 5 is the cheapest Echo with a screen, and it’s designed to be the perfect bedroom partner with Alexa built-in. And, while this smart display can do a lot more, that’s where it really shines.

The 2nd-gen Show 5 has been refreshed for 2021, and it still does its job effectively, but small upgrades mean there’s no incentive to replace your old Show 5 with this model.

If you were planning on hooking it up to some nicer speakers, you might think again about choosing this one over the original one (no audio jack here).

However, you might want it for the relatively improved camera (2 megapixels over 1). This improves its video calling capabilities with other Alexas (no Zoom here), as well as its capabilities as a smart security camera.

However, if you’re looking for either of those characteristics in your Alexa-enabled smart display, the Show 8 is the clear winner, thanks to a far superior camera and a faster processor. You’re getting a lot more bang for your buck for an extra $45 there.

We’ve been using the second-generation Echo Show 5 for a few weeks now, and here’s our full review.

Design and characteristics of the second-generation Echo Show

The design is identical to the first-generation model, with a few minor changes, such as a slightly altered camera shape that allows for a little beefed-up camera (now rocking a whopping 2 megapixels).

The 5.5-inch screen (which is actually smaller than most smartphones) with its underwhelming 960 x 480-pixel touchscreen is nonetheless surrounded by a large, thick bezel. The camera still has a privacy shutter, and Show 5 has the same cubic-shaped back that holds the speaker.

Unfortunately, the 3.5 mm audio port has been removed, so you won’t be able to connect this to external speakers with a cable like you could with the original Show 5 (which is still obtainable for $5 cheaper).

There are more colour possibilities in terms of design, including blue and a revamped white, as well as a chameleon green option if you choose the Kids Edition. For an extra $10, you can get a year of Amazon Kids + service (although you can add Amazon Kids + to any Echo device during setup).

Aside from the camera, there are no internal changes, so you’ll get the same MediaTek MT 8163 chipset processor as the original Show. The other adjustments, on the other hand, are software-based.

The new Show 5 has home monitoring (more on that later), a person recognition option for Routines, and a tap-to-snooze feature. Aside from that, it has all of the same features as the original Show 5.

This has a brilliant screen with a wide range of backgrounds and clock faces to choose from. We chose the latter because this device is suitable for use as a bedside alarm clock.

However, despite the fact that it supports Prime and Netflix streaming, the screen is not up to par for watching videos (but oddly not Hulu — which is on the bigger Shows).

The screen adjusts to the brightness of the room, so if you want it to dim when the lights go out, it will. Although, when used as a bedside clock, we found it to be a little too bright, especially when compared to the Google Nest Hub, which is an all-around better bedside companion.

On the top, you’ll find the usual controls: volume up and down, a mute switch that turns off the microphone, and a physical shutter that covers the lens and turns off the camera’s power — useful if you’re keeping it by your bed.

The speaker in the back, as it was in the original form, is quite remarkable. It’s not particularly loud, but it’s pleasant enough to listen to in bed or at work if you keep it on your desk.

The microphones, on the other hand, aren’t as good. The Show 5 (and its larger sister, the Show 8) are the least responsive to orders of all the Echos we’ve tested, possibly because the mics are directed away from you if you’re facing the screen.

When we asked Show 5 to perform something, around seven times out of ten, another Echo in the home responded.

As an alarm clock, the Echo Show 5 (2nd generation)

The Echo Show 5’s size and style make it suitable for use as a bedside alarm clock. If you still have a Casio alarm clock next to your bed, this is a great update.

Simply said, you can use touch or voice to create and adjust alarms directly from the device. Then, with a tap or a command, dismiss or snooze them.

You can set up Routines to be triggered when you dismiss an alarm if you want to get fancy. With just one word or a tap on the screen, you can have Alexa read you the news, gradually brighten your smart lights, raise your smart shades, set your connected thermostat to the proper temperature, and start playing your favourite radio station.

We also like the sunrise effect, which starts 15 minutes before any alarm set between 4 am and 9 am and gradually brightens the display. It’s a gentle way to get you up before your alarm goes off.

When it comes to the alarm, we like how there are so many different alarm tones to choose from (you can only set these in the Alexa app, however). It’s always a laugh to wake up to the antics of The Grand Tour hosts (at least it was for me when I set it for my son’s alarm on the first day of school — it caused him quite a scare).

The tap-to-snooze function is a lovely touch. In tests, it gave you an extra 10 minutes of sleep without you having to say a word or blearily tap at the screen.

The finest feature here, though, is the one that we all love about Alexa: on-demand music and radio. Overall, the Show 5 has excellent speakers for its size, and listening to music on it is one of our favourite applications, particularly in a tiny space like a bedroom.

As an added benefit, if you subscribe to Amazon Music, the display scrolls the lyrics of the songs, making it a great karaoke machine in a kid’s room.

If you’re light-sensitive, the only true complaint as a bedroom smart speaker is that the screen is still a little too bright at night.

Alexa and Everyday Use with the Echo Show 5 (2nd Gen)

While all of the advantages of utilising the Alexa speech assistant are right and available (see our comprehensive guide for more information), the Show 5 falls short as a touch-screen controller for your Alexa-powered smart home.

You can access smart home controls for compatible devices like cameras and lighting by swiping from the right, but the touch interface is so slow and the icons for each device are so enormous that if you have more than a few connected devices, you’ll give up and use voice control instead.

In an emergency, the new Home Monitoring feature, which allows you to check the footage from the Show’s camera remotely using the Alexa app, comes in handy. However, the wedge shape tilts the camera up, causing you to stare at the ceiling. Only useful if Spiderman is breaking into your house.

If you don’t want anyone in your household to be able to check in on you, you can disable the Home Monitoring option. However, if someone tries to look in, the Show displays a helpful warning on the screen and gives you the choice to shut them down straight on the device.

While the 2-megapixel camera improves video calling slightly, it only works for Alexa calls (not than Zoom, as on the Show 8), and the wedge design, along with the smaller screen, means that everyone is looking right at you.

Person detection for Routines is also possible with the camera, allowing you to use the movements of a person in front of the camera to start a routine.

Create a Routine that plays “Dogs Barking,” turns on all the lights, and sends me a notification when a human is detected; this works best as a security feature.

We found it to be rather patchy when we tried to set it up for a home automation routine that switched on a ceiling fan whenever someone entered the room. For the camera to work properly, the individual must be directly in front of it.

When someone hits your Ring Video Doorbell or you ask to see the feed of your Blink camera, the Show 5 can pull up live feeds from any of your compatible linked cameras.

We found the feed to be a little slow to load, but once it did, it looked fine and the audio was clear.

5th Generation Amazon Echo Show

The Echo Show 5 is a fantastic small device that works well as a bedside alarm clock. However, the second-generation model’s minor improvements aren’t enough to make it a must-have if you currently own a Show 5. This small smart display is largely overshadowed by its more powerful brother, the Show 8. It’s an excellent choice for a child’s bedroom or a great bedside alarm clock for you at this price point. Look elsewhere in the Echo lineup if you want to utilise it as a smart home control screen.

PROS

• A higher-quality camera
• For its size, this speaker is quite good.
• Video calling has been improved.
• Option for home monitoring
• Shutters for privacy

CONS

• The touch screen is laggy.
• Hearing impairment
• There is no audio jack.
• The smart home controller is broken.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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Amazon Echo Show 5 (2nd Gen) was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It is easy to get spooked by the fiction of robots taking over the human world when in reality robots being a part of the human workforce is great.

Robotic process automation eliminates the barrier of employees’ need of performing mundane tasks and enables them to focus on other productive business activities.

In this article, we are going to discuss the top 5 ways that keep you on the right track for RPA bots collaboration.

But first, what are RPA bots?

RPA bots are software robots that perform tasks in a digital environment. These bots aim to automate repetitive tasks and therefore, they are also known as the “digital workforce”.

RPA in Organizations

In traditional automation tools, software developers have to create a list of actions to automate the tasks and interface to back-end systems using application programming interfaces (APIs).

In contrast, robotic process automation develops the action list by performing the task in the graphical user interface (GUI), and then automatically repeating these tasks directly in GUI.

But integrating daily standard operating procedures (SOP) and establishing an SOP for maintaining, updating, and re-evaluating automation is challenging. Once this is achieved both companies and employees will reap the benefits of automation.

Introducing employees to the present and future of work and automation can help businesses grow leaps and bounds. For instance, imagine the benefits if an employee can shift their focus from analyzing the spreadsheets to developing several pivot suggestions based on AI’s analysis!

Related Read: What is RPA? A Detailed Guide for Business Owners

5 Ways to Foster Collaboration between Humans and Robots

1. Understanding RPA benefits

There are various reasons organizations are implementing RPA as a solution to increase productivity and efficiency for their business. Working with robots and sharing their benefits would help your employees access the importance of automation in the workforce.

Of the most cited benefits of RPA, customer satisfaction & speed to market are the best ones after productivity and product quality.

Here are a few reasons employees can look forward to benefiting from their digital co-workers:

• Boosted productivity: By taking advantage of the automation provided by RPA bots, the human workforce can get back their time to focus on more valuable tasks.
• Better accuracy: RPA bots act as helping hands in tasks that have an added risk of human errors, such as in data entries.
• More reliability: Bots react and respond to events in real-time performing processes while employees focus on other things, to keep their workflows running 24/7.

2. Accessing business needs for RPA

Overview your existing tasks, workflows, and processes, and understand what can be changed to optimize these processes? When starting with RPA, identify your systems that need to change so that your human employees can spend time on tasks suited to them.

The time wasted on repetitive tasks, and the money lost per year as shown in the statistics above are the two solid reasons why your business needs RPA, along with human resources.

No matter how great the bots are, humans are still better at critical thinking, strategizing, and problem-solving. So, RPA bots are not here to replace employees, but to assist them with efficiently getting their jobs done.

To get the best experience with collaborative robots, focus on your human employees, and when you have learned the benefits you can jump right in and automate everything.

3. Find your Automation Approach

Not all bots are created equal, different bots serve different purposes. There are mainly two types of RPA bots, attended and non-attended, and the third one, Intelligent process automation still in its infancy.

Attended bots help you complete your everyday tasks easier but with human intervention. These tasks go into action when a user commands them. On the other hand, unattended automation work behind the scenes. These bots get triggered when an action such as a file being added into the folder is performed.

Both of these automation types are important for human collaboration with robots, and companies can use one type of mix, whichever suits the employee’s needs better.

4. Automate Processes with RPA Bots

As you start implementing RPA and automation in your organization grows, you’ll be able to provide an RPA bot for all your employees. A great RPA solution is that which can provide bots for the right optimization.

Here are a few real-life examples of RPA implementation and collaboration in the workplace:

→ RPA in Banking (Carter Bank & trust)

Problem: Too much wasted time on routine, manual tasks from employee on-boarding to customer account management.

RPA Solution: After bringing RPA culture to the organization, these processes were streamlined and over 300,000 customer accounts were migrated to the new system within 24 hours.

Benefit: Achieved 3,800% ROI within 5 months

→ RPA in Telecommunications

Problem: Manual logging into websites to capture and consolidate customer billing information, more than 40 employees were assigned to this tedious error-prone task.

RPA Solution: Software bots are taking over these repetitive and manual tasks. MetTel also combined automation with remediation to improve the response times.

Benefit: Replaced 75% of their manual efforts with software robots.

→ RPA in Healthcare

Problem: The traditional claim management system accepted only one claim file each day from 837 daily generated files.

RPA Solution: Baptist Health automated the daily transfers of these files to the FTP server which resulted in greater centralized control over thousands of file transfers that occur each day.

Benefits: Saved 40 hours a month in manual tasks.

Related Read: RPA Use Cases In The Real World [Updated 2022]

5. Maximize the Collaboration

The final step for reaping benefits from collaboration between the human workforce and bots is to maximize the collaboration and make the most out of the RPA bots. RPA bots can give your employees more time while improving their work-life balance. Collaborative robots can fill in and work 24/7 with a little time off allowing your employees to enjoy their freedom.

RPA bots can also help you automate your tasks such as website monitoring, that require 24/7 attention, so instead of having a human employee monitor the status of the webpages, you can implement website automation for the same.

Transform your Business with RPA

We all are already familiar with the idea of automation, it has made our lives easier, and better.

Streamlining your business tedious tasks helps you save time, reduce costs and increase efficiency in your business processes. Introducing RPA bots in your business doesn’t mean that you are taking their jobs away, but simplifying them by automating repetitive and mundane tasks.

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Working & Collaborating with RPA Bots: Top 5 Ways to Succeed was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Singapore, 9 May 2022 – Noodle Factory, Singapore’s leading AI-powered EdTech platform, is pleased to announce their partnership with Vygo, an Australian-based one-stop hub for student support, offering complementary pilot programmes for educational institutions. While Noodle Factory leverages AI to scale exam preparation and tutoring, helping educators save up to 400 hours a year, Vygo hosts all sorts of peer and student support initiatives for universities and higher education institutions, engaging students and transforming student experiences, and is on track to champion 1,000,000 students before the 2020 student cohort graduates in 2023. Together, they allow higher education institutions to scale experiences for both audiences to new heights.

“We believe that EdTech plays an essential role in education. Thus, developing a paradigm for EdTech to instil flexibility and resilience into the system is key. With this partnership with Vygo, we are able to move the needle and meet the needs in developing longer-term strategies, contributing to the EdTech ecosystem and creating a robust and dynamic learning environment for all,” said Yvonne Soh, co-founder and CEO of Noodle Factory.

Addressing needs of educators and students as institutions rethink edtech strategies

As higher education institutions transition to a post-pandemic era, more are rethinking their long-term strategies for deploying EdTech. The pandemic has prodded educators and students to make major decisions and changes in their approach to teaching and learning, finding solutions to meet the needs and expectations of learning. This partnership enriches the long-term strategies for EdTech as Noodle Factory and Vygo are able to achieve this by streamlining the learning and teaching process, while providing expert mentorship for student support and career success. Together, this collaboration value-adds to the education landscape whereby students and educators can both benefit from this approach.

The need for education is constant. Thus, the need to rethink longer-term strategies for EdTech to re-imagine learning will become an integral part of education, resulting in a more responsive and adaptable learning environment. It is crucial to think ahead based on the current approach, distribution, and pedagogy in education for greater heights of success in the Edtech space.

“For us at Vygo, we put personalised support at the fingertips of every student. We ensure no student would be ever left behind as we aim to empower students to support one another and higher education institutions to create impactful peer mentoring and student support programs. We are excited to partner with Noodle Factory to establish a stronger ecosystem in EdTech,” shared Ben Hallett, co-founder and CEO of Vygo.

This partnership will offer them the means to do so and move forward on an upward trajectory, scaling optimised and engaging experiences for educators and students alike.

There is a need for an innovative approach to make headway and identify key elements of the EdTech evaluation process. This alliance between Noodle Factory and Vygo offers the opportunity to narrow the gap and immerse themselves in modern technologies while taking it one step further.

Furthermore, there may be opportunities for this alliance to be extended to other complementary EdTech companies. This will create and build a collaborative and thriving EdTech ecosystem that benefits not just educational institutions but also all educators and students as they enter the classroom of the future.

At Bot Libre we have always been developing artificial intelligence for the Metaverse, we just did not have a name for it. The Bot Libre AI engine has always been designed to have a mind with multiple senses, it’s just that with plain chat user interfaces, those senses could not be truly actualized. The Metaverse now provides a rich multi-sensory environment, and we are extremely excited to evolve the Bot Libre AI engine and platform to navigate the Metaverse.

We are developing new 3D and VR apps and SDKs to integrate the Bot Libre platform with the evolving Metaverse. We are integrating Bot Libre’s NLP, vision, and spatial artificial intelligence algorithms into the Metaverse environment.

What is the Metaverse

The Metaverse is a term used to describe a new vision for the Internet as a decentralized 3D space. The Metaverse includes various technologies including:

• 3D — 3D Worlds and Spaces
• VR — Virtual Reality
• AR — Augmented Reality
• AI — Artificial Intelligence
• Web3 — Crypto Currencies, NTFs, Block Chain

Why the Metaverse Needs AI

The Metaverse needs chatbots and AI to enable immersive interactions with users.

• VR/AR user interfaces are based on speech, chat, and 3D interaction, blending well with chatbots
• Metaverse is 24/7, businesses, events, online schools, and games that engage users in this space require chatbots and automated interactions
• The Metaverse is multi-sensory, AI bots need to integrate NLP, vision, audio, spatial awareness, and navigation.

Why AI Needs the Metaverse

To evolve, AI needs an immersive multi-sensory environment which is the Metaverse. Existing AI models are single-purpose, single-sensory. True intelligence requires multi-sensory learning and a rich environment to interact with other intelligence entities.

The Bot Libre OMNI Deep Learning Model

The human brain is not a single neural network, but a kludge of multiple networks all interacting with each other at multiple levels. The concept of the Bot Libre OMNI model is that if you feed the output nodes and deep links from multiple deep learning models, actively processing continuous input from multiple senses into OMNI meta models, you can achieve a higher level of intelligence than possible from a single model.

Join Us

We are looking for businesses, organizations, and developers that are interested in being early adopters of the Metaverse technologies, in order to shape, play, participate, and even profit from the Metaverse, by working with us to drive our open source metaverse AI solution.

We will be starting our Bot Libre Metaverse Beta Program soon. If you are interested in applying to be part of the program please contact sales@botlibre.biz.

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Why the Metaverse Needs AI, and AI Needs the Metaverse was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.