Category: Chat

One question we hear a lot is “What’s the best way to start testing a chatbot ?” The answer is surprisingly simple: Build up knowledge by educating yourself, and you will be able to answer this question yourself. This post will walk you through the major milestones that test automation engineers have to take for building this knowledge. We will suggest readings and other material that you might find helpful as well.

Step One: Build a First Sample Chatbot

The best way to get going is to actually build yourself a sample chatbot. The reason is that some things like natural language processing (NLP) might appear like magic if you are new to the topic. They aren’t. I suggest to take one of these tutorials — don’t worry, all of them have free plans available:

• Quickstart: Build an agent (Google Dialogflow)
• Getting started with Watson Assistant (IBM Watson Assistant)

Go the whole way from starting the project to publishing a chatbot on a preview website — everything you need is included in those cloud platforms.

I do not recommend to start with a free, self-hosted stack like Rasa, as it might distract from the journey to become a chatbot tester by tearing your focus more towards infrastructure topics and actual chatbot development.

Step Two: Understand Machine Learning Concepts and Metrics

When dealing with non-trivial chatbots, there is always a machine learning component for natural language processing (NLP) involved. You do not have to get an expert in machine learning to efficiently test them, but you definitely have to understand the taxonomy used in machine learning projects. The central concepts to learn are:

• Intents, Entities, Utterances
• Accuracy, Sensitivity, Specificity, Precision, Recall, F1-Score
• Confidence and Confidence Threshold
• Confusion Matrix

Here are some links to introductory articles:

• Upskilling for test automation engineers — Testing Conversational AI
• Quality Metrics for NLU/Chatbot Training Data (Part 2)
• Upskilling Test Engineers for Chatbot Projects

Trending Bot Articles:

1. Chatbot Trends Report 2021

2. DO’s and 3 DON’Ts for Training a Chatbot NLP Model

3. Concierge Bot: Handle Multiple Chatbots from One Chat Screen

4. An expert system: Conversational AI Vs Chatbots

Step Three: Get Comfortable with BotiumScript

You learned how to test websites with Selenium. You learned how to test smartphone apps with Appium. You might be tempted to think A chatbot is basically a website answering questions, why not using Selenium or Appium for testing a chatbot ? Chatbots are a new kind of apps that require new kind of tools to perform effective and high-coverage testing — a goal that cannot be reached with slow, real-time, flaky end-2-end tests.

Wrote about this conflict in one of my previous blog posts.

So invest some days to educate yourself with BotiumScript, an easy-to-learn scripting language for describing chatbot test cases. You can start at the official Botium Docs or watch Shama Ugale in one of her awesome talks:

Step Four: Get Your Toolstack In Place

In kitchen one of the most important phrases is mise en place — it means to put everything into place before getting started with cooking. Now that you have a good understanding of the basics, it is time to get your tool stack in place you can use for your chatbot testing projects.

• Subscribe to a free-forever Botium Box Mini instance to optimize your learning curve — Botium Box includes everything to get you started, all you need is a web browser
• For command line afficienados, install Botium CLI, the swiss-army-knife for chatbot testing
• If you are used to test runners like Mocha, Jest or Jasmine, you will love Botium Bindings

To get started in Botium Box, read through the Botium Box Wiki with tutorials, howtos, technical background and reference docs.

Step Five: Understand the Challenges of Chatbot Testing

There are some important differences when testing a chatbot as compared to websites or smartphone apps. What will strike experienced test automation engineers most is that a user can ask a chatbot literally anything (and the users will do as soon as the chatbot is live, believe me). Dealing with non-determinism is a critical topic in software testing. Due to the nature of human language it is impossible for software tests to cover all possible situations.

You can read more in one of my previous blog posts.

Because of this it is even more important to understand the required test levels to meet at least the minimum quality standards in software projects.

• Regression Testing on API level— Identify flaws in the conversation flow before going to production
• NLP Testing — Improve your chatbot understanding
• E2E Testing — Verifying the end-user experience
• Voice Testing — Understand your users on voice channels
• Performance Testing — Ensure your chatbot is responsive under high load
• Security Testing — Making your chatbot secure
• Monitoring — Get notified when problems arise

Read about some important pitfulls here: 4 DO’s and 3 DON’Ts for Chatbot Testing Strategies

The good news is that you can shine and partially re-use your test automation skills gathered in your previous projects in chatbot testing as well.

Up and Beyond

Wherever you are in your journey, from building your first sample chatbot to running a full-blown continuous chatbot testing pipeline, we’re delighted to have you as part of our Botium community. Please feel free to ask questions on our Botium forum. We look forward to helping you in your journey to become a chatbot testing expert!

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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The 5 Step Journey to Becoming a Chatbot Tester 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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In the past decade, almost all tasks related to transactions involved paperwork in some way or the other. Due to the evolution of digital technology, the scenario has changed. The latter dominates the majority of the tasks these days.

Transforming the mor tgaging process aside, the penetration of digital technology in the process has also raised the bar for customers’ expectations.

Better output with minimal effort is one of the notable highlights of digital lending. As regards the process, it has become as easy for buyers as buying an item from an online store. It makes use of chatbots which comes in handy to simplify many operations.

Going by statistical figures, 80% of businesses would use chatbots, and 85% of customers would interact with interactive voice response (IVR) technology . These figures explain which digital lending transactions are under the spotlight.

Plus, these stats also highlight the bright prospects of mortgage chatbots in digital lending. The introduction to mortgage chatbots in digital lending has helped highlight the role of automation.

Automation powers chatbots and simplifies digital-lending-related tasks in several ways. Read on to find them out in the article.

Learn how AI Chatbot will transform the Mortgage Industry in 2021

Chatbots automate customer interactions

Deploying chatbots is one of the smartest ways to accomplish repetitive tasks within a shorter turnaround time. Its method of working revolves around the feature of automation, which makes it possible for customers to get timely solutions without waiting for a longer duration.

When it comes to mortgages, digital chatbots make use of artificial intelligence (AI) to answer questions and perform other tasks like verification of digital documents. Such tasks, in general, necessitate data sifting. The automation technology of chatbots is the best way to sift through large chunks of data, especially when you need to do so within a few seconds.

Above everything else, most digital lenders think about using chatbots for their seamless interaction. This, in turn, leads to two additional benefits: it minimizes the operational costs on one hand, and it boosts sales on the other.

The predominance of the AI component of chatbots is visible in the current customer service of digital lenders. Apart from refining customer service in lending, it has also helped redefine it.

Among other things, the digital interactions with chatbots give providers an option to offer round-the-clock solutions to their customers for some common issues. This arrangement suffices to offer reliable solutions to the majority of customer issues at the basic level.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. Chatbot Trends Report 2021

2. 4 DO’s and 3 DON’Ts for Training a Chatbot NLP Model

3. Concierge Bot: Handle Multiple Chatbots from One Chat Screen

4. An expert system: Conversational AI Vs Chatbots

How mortgage chatbots reduce the time required for the submission of documents

The days of lengthy paperwork and extensive documentation are long gone. Nowadays, customers neither have the time nor the patience to bear with long sessions of documentation.

Besides, carrying large piles of documents leads to inconvenience. It was a feasible option until a few years ago but it has become obsolete now.

Digital mortgage applications such as chatbots have helped eliminate this requirement. Instead of asking the customers to carry the hard copies of relevant documents, most providers look for the necessary information from aggregators and third-party providers through chatbots.

Apart from collecting information, help both lenders and their customers in storing information in the digital space without any inconvenience.

Not only this, but it also gives lenders full control to perform tasks related to compliance and auditing.

Here’s a ready-to-deploy Smart skill that will help users upload their documents required to process their request:

The role of chatbots in the validation of documents

After a digital submission of relevant documents by a user, mortgage bots analyze them properly to classify them into different categories. Mortgage bots follow this rule while going through all incoming digital documents from customers’ end.

Next, these bots look for the important information as necessitated by a lender. These include a customer’s name, their remuneration, the name of the employer under whom they are working, and so on.

In case of unavailability of an important detail or multiple details, mortgage bots raise a flag. They may also do so if the documents are inconsistent or do not match. This helps a lender verify if a customer has submitted the authentic copies of documents as per the requirements to process their digital lending application.

After the process of reconciliation, mortgage bots take the next action depending on the outcome. If the documents provided match all the requirements, these bots notify the customer that their application process is complete.

In general, these tasks can be time-taking or tedious if done by human effort. Because these tasks are repetitive by nature, these tasks oftentimes lead to boredom. However, mortgage bots work diligently to accomplish these tasks and deliver the desired outcomes in quick time.

Read More: Why Financial Services Brands Should Leverage Conversational AI for Customer Care

Mortgage bots protect the communication and the documents between lenders and borrowers

Digital lending involves two parties: the lender and the borrower. Protecting the communication and documents concerning the interaction of both is important. It is one of the basic requirements to make the whole procedure secure.

Mortgage bots play an important role in protecting communication and documents from prying eyes. As a result, both the lender and the borrower find the whole process safe. What makes it possible for a bot to achieve this objective is the integration of a centralized authentication system with digital lending solutions.

The addition of a security layer to the whole process of digital lending by mortgage bots makes a vital contribution to ensure transparency. In a way, it helps reduce the possibility of financial fraud which prevents the likelihood of lenders or borrowers suffering a loss.

How mortgage chatbots minimize time and effort in decision-making and processing offers

Decision-making is one of the most important aspects of closing a loan application. An individual applies for a loan only depending on their demands. Plus, other factors also decide the fate of a loan application.

For instance, the eligibility of a person who applies for a loan is an important requirement. Every lender has some criteria. A borrower must meet the requirement of the lender for the successful processing of their loan application. Considering the variety of offers and schemes that lenders provide to their customers these days, it can put both the former and the latter at a disadvantage. Mortgage bots play a vital role in forming the decision-making process for customers.

Identifying the best offers for a specific customer can be a tedious process for a lender. As is the case with commercial lending, this practice can necessitate a long duration of time for mortgage loans too.

Among other things, mortgage bots present the best offers and schemes to customers. They do it considering all the eligibility criteria of customers.

This helps the relevant customers in making quick decisions on whether they are interested in taking a loan offer from a lender.

Browsing through several offers from a lender can be monotonous. Nine out of ten times, customers are frustrated looking for the best offer. This can have a negative influence on their outcome to apply for a loan.

They are more likely to choose a loan offer if they find its important details at their fingertips. This is precisely where mortgage bots come into the picture. These bots showcase the best offers to customers corresponding to their requirements and eligibility criteria.

With chatbots, it becomes easy to classify and split documents into different file structures. They use machine learning algorithms and data mining to conclude this process.

This whole process eases the lenders to distribute documents into different categories. Based on it, they prescribe the best loan offers to customers.

Thus, the whole process of presenting relevant offers to customers becomes streamlined. It goes on to help lenders in getting the best response from their customers and also in closing more digital lending deals at the subsequent stages.

Here’s an expert guide on Implementing Conversational AI for Financial Services

Mortgage chatbots serve 24×7

Unlike their human counterparts, chatbots don’t take a break. What it means is that a mortgage chatbot can keep performing as long as a lender wants, without any breakdown.

Professionals, on the other hand, have a fixed timing of their duty hours. If a customer drops an email or details the number outside the duty hours, it will not be immediately entertained.

Besides, chatbots have an edge over human professionals because they have a ready-made answer for each query. Because it uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze data, it becomes more efficient in providing solutions without taking a lot of time.

The role of chatbots in electronic closing

Following the verification of the submitted documents, the next important step in digital lending is closing the deal. The traditional method necessitated lenders to meet an in-person agent to close such lending deals. However, the emergence of mortgage chatbots has changed the process altogether.

Meeting an in-person agent not only proves to be a time-consuming practice but also delays or slows down the process due to discussion-related concerns. However, mortgage chatbots reduce the possibility of delays, particularly with the challenges linked to the clearance of documentation.

Together with the concept of digital lending, mortgage chatbots provide a viable solution to beat the challenge. It eliminates the role of paperwork which constitutes the root cause of the problem.

By adding mobile capability and using the power of the Internet, it reduces the existing friction in the financing process. These attributes make electronic closing a simple and straightforward process.

Other than electronic closure, mortgage chatbots also make another key contribution to the efforts of lenders. They help lenders evaluate the transaction history of customers to facilitate the approval of the lending application request of borrowers.

Learn more: 9 Best Chatbots in the Financial Services Industry

To Sum Up

The definition of lending has changed over the last few years. Digital lending has replaced the traditional paperwork-based mortgage lending. Credit goes to mortgage chatbots that operate on AI technology, and make the process more transparent, fast, and secure.

Though mortgage chatbots are the best option for digital lending, their best is yet to come. With the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence and digital technology, you can expect many more innovations and advancements in the coming years.

Keeping the aforementioned benefits of mortgage chatbots in digital lending, both lenders and customers should think of using them to reduce time and effort in processing digital mortgage loans. This can go a long way toward making the whole process transparent and efficient for lenders. Also, it can help with shaping up and improving the digital lending experience for borrowers.

Want to develop an Intelligent Virtual Assistant solution for your brand?

GET IN TOUCH

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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Digital Lending Made Easy with Mortgage Chatbots was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As far as emerging technologies are concerned, conversational AI is transforming the global customer experience. We are in the 4th business revolution, and traditional manufacturing and supply chain management has endured a complete digital makeover. The components of the supply chain in the age of industrial AI have become essential, considering the nature of the workload.

Customers are constantly in touch with your businesses to know the status of assigned work. The major pain point is how to keep track of your SCM process on live mode?

This is where Nuacem’s flagship products play an essential role in resolving the queries 24/7 for your esteemed business. If your customer considers you reliable, then it’s of utmost importance to delivery on time. You gain customer trust through the conversational AI offered by Market leaders.

Supply chain management is a complex process. They expect unsurprisingly established workflows. In this competitive environment, conventional interface and complex routings of apps may affect the user experience adversely. Like GUI now we have CUI — Conversational user interface wherein we will know the necessary details through natural language either through text or voice.

Automation has allowed superior management of the flow of goods and services, sophisticated analytics, leading-edge warehousing, and inventory management plans.

Nuacem’s flagship AI-powered chatbots offer a Conversational User Interface — CUI solutions for your supply chain and manufacturing operations. Right from placing orders to processing payments and tracking orders, these bots perform multiple requests.

With easier data retrieval and better interaction with your CRM systems, bots are helpful in transforming the user experience for your customers from start to finish. Unlike ordinary monotonous bots, nuacem’s bots are fully capable of understanding your customers’ utterances and perform intent analysis.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. Chatbot Trends Report 2021

2. 4 DO’s and 3 DON’Ts for Training a Chatbot NLP Model

3. Concierge Bot: Handle Multiple Chatbots from One Chat Screen

4. An expert system: Conversational AI Vs Chatbots

Nuacem’s conversational AI engine

Nuacem’s smart and intelligent chatbot machine learning engine acts as an independent platform maintaining its database, which can be integrated into any of your systems. Each system will be assigned an organization ID, and training data will be stored in the database against that ID along with the primary language of the bot.

The models generate pickle files for every bot and stores the training data in these files. The pickle files are generated depending on the engine that uses neural network models to predict answers in a contextual manner. Every user input will be sent to the engine to check whether there are any intent/faq/Smalltalk/entity matches.

Nuacem’s Conversational AI — adding value to YOUR business

The following are essential benefits of integrating smart and intelligent bots to your enterprise platform for a better customer experience, which in turn boosts your business.

24/7 Support:

• Your business doesn’t require a dedicated agent to respond to queries, shipment tracking, or bookings. Bots provide seamless support round the clock.
• SCM chatbots can manage a broad range of assignments such as communication, procurement, payment processing, etc. They will also trigger the notification to the human agents if required.

Live tracking:

• In supply chain & manufacturing, order reference and time are of paramount importance. Nuacem’s bots reduce service queues and provide the live status of an order to the clients.

Superior Customer Relationships:

• Enhanced customer experience is achieved due to real-time, and simple navigation with reduced wait time makes even more productive for your business.

Conversational User Interface:

• Clients receive customized responses to their queries in the simplest form. Hence, customer engagement is on the highest level based on contextual conversation, allowing them to finalize the deals.

ML:

• Bots use sophisticated machine learning in supply chain management. They become smarter with each interaction, and consequently, the operations continue to become more efficient over a period of time.

Why should you choose Nuacem’s AI-powered Suite to build your chatbots for Supply chain and logistics?

Faster Responses:

• Nuacem’s Botjet provides a 100% uptime which implies there is almost no delay in a bot response, and your consumers get the essential information on the go.

Integration with Enterprise Systems:

• Nuacem’s products can be easily incorporated with your current enterprise systems and applications like your websites, messaging apps, and internal apps.

Actionable Insights:

• Bots record each customer’s interaction and provide you with precious understandings that help you to modify your approaches for better performance. Bots become wiser over more interactions.

Maintenance and Support:

• Nuacem also helps you with routine maintenance and other assistance concerning your bots. Hence, you get flawless and continual support from your bots to capitalize on each interaction of the customer.

To provide you the right intelligence to the right individuals at the right time is a primary pain point for most of SCM enterprises. With bots, you ensure transparent supply chain management for your associates, customers, and merchants. Customers can flawlessly track their shipments round the clock.

Finally, Nuacem is an AI-powered omnichannel customer engagement platform that represents the full features and capabilities required to build advanced customer engagement, experience, and support solutions built for your businesses. The Nuacem’s flagship Conversational Platform — Botjet, delivers comprehensive features and abilities required to develop advanced and intelligent enterprise-grade chatbot solutions.

Nuacem’s AI platform powers natural language business products that are continually enhanced through AI-powered tools and platforms that empower human capital to evaluate performance manages the conversations and enhance end-user experience immaculately.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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AI Redefining your Manufacturing and Supply Chain Management was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Fed up with scripted Chatbot conversations? Fix it with a “Brain”​

Have you ever interacted with a chatbot that frustrated you with its rigid conversation structure and irrelevant responses? This is because it is fully scripted, leaving you with no choice but to click on fixed response buttons to receive further irritating throwback responses.

Want to create a smart chatbot? The secret lies in creating a “brain” with Natural Language Processing (NLP) capability to go with it. A chatbot with a “brain”, we call it “Workbot”.

What is NLP?

Simply put, NLP is an element of AI that seeks to improve communication between humans and computers by helping the latter read and understand natural human language. It relates thoughts, language and patterns of behaviour learned through experience to specific outcomes.

NLP primarily focuses on continual learning to become more intelligent. It is this self-learning ability that increases its effectiveness over time.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. Chatbot Trends Report 2021

2. 4 DO’s and 3 DON’Ts for Training a Chatbot NLP Model

3. Concierge Bot: Handle Multiple Chatbots from One Chat Screen

4. An expert system: Conversational AI Vs Chatbots

Build Workbots with NLP capability to increase engagement

An intelligent Workbot is one that is capable of handling any conversation with ease. And a well-developed “brain” (NLP) can add a suave and sassy “personality” to a Workbot.

These two components contribute to the #1 factor for increasing customer engagement.

All said and done, a Workbot with a suave and sassy personality gives your customers an experience close to talking with a vivacious character thus creating a positive and memorable experience at various customer journey touch points.

BOTSPICE simplifies the “Brain” work to give your Workbot a personality

BOTSPICE takes away the sweat and labour of building your desired “brain” to support your Workbot conversation. With pre-designed NLP functions, you can get your “brain” up and running quickly without any sort of coding. The “personality” that exudes from the”brain” responses, coupled with the interactive and flexibly arranged Workbot conversation will enthrall your customers and keep them connected in any conversation.

Build Workbots with “brains”

Get BOTSPICE.

Visit us,

www.botspice.com

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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Have you ever interacted with a chatbot that frustrated you with its rigid conversation structure… 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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