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We have a range of platforms and methods for developing chatbots. Each chatbot has its own personality. It all depends on who the users are and how they use it.

At a high level, any chatbot would fall under one of the below types

Rule-Based Chatbots: They are guided chatbots where the bot guides the user by prompting options for selection until the final response.

Smart Chatbots: They understand the context and emotions of user queries and respond accordingly.

Hybrid Chatbots: It involves both rule-based and intelligence-based approaches to better understand and meet user needs.

A standard chatbot would require an NLP, backend code to generate responses, and an optional live support executive if the bot is unable to recognize.

An NLP is required to understand the meaning of the user question and to construct a human-like conversation with users. For each user question, a score is determined for each intent in a bot, and the one with the highest value is most likely the exact matching intent.

Consider the case of an HR bot with three intents and a backend service that collects responses from multiple sources.

Problem

When there are multiple chatbots for different departments across the enterprise, It can be difficult for users to remember or recognize which chatbot to use.

The best solution is to build a “concierge/centralized chatbot” that can serve all of the user’s questions intelligently and route them to the appropriate chatbots maintaining a human-like conversation.

This can be achieved in multiple ways

1. Concierge bot without an NLP
2. Concierge bot with its own NLP
3. Concierge bot without an NLP but, directly accessing the NLPs of respective chatbots

Let us consider some scenarios and observe the pros and cons of each:

1. Concierge bot without an NLP

Let us create a centralized chatbot without an NLP for 3 different chatbots, and allow it to start the conversation with a welcome message with 3 quick replies where it can route to. On the backend will write if-else or switch logic to handle user selection and connect to the respective chatbot.

That’s not a smart idea at all. It lacks the human approach since the customer cannot type his sentence directly (which is the most crucial in a perfect chatbot). An NLP would have improved here, but let’s not spend money on one just yet; we can get away with hardcoding some keywords for each chatbot.

For example:

Human_Resouce = [“timesheet”, “hr”, “shift”, “on-call”, “leave”, “hours” etc…]

Financial_Queries = [“financial year”, “salary”, “tax”, “deduction” etc…]

Bank_Policies= [“fixed”, “current”, “deposit”, “credit” etc…]

When a user says “I am unable to submit my timesheet”, since the timesheet keyword is present in the Human_Resource list, the user is connected to the HR Chatbot, and the interaction will continue there until the user closes the conversation.

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What if you have more and more separate chatbots?

We can still use the previous method, but as the number of chatbots grows, the bot would be unable to maintain a human-like conversation with users and it would again leave users perplexed while making a selection.

So, I believe it is now time to add a natural language processor (NLP) to our concierge bot.

2. Concierge bot with its own NLP

But, wait! how do we train a Concierge Bot? * Which utterances should I use to train our Concierge Bot?

1. Pick the subset of utterances from each intent of each bot and combine them to form intent in the Concierge bot? i.e., each bot’s trained utterances will become an intent of the Concierge bot.

This might work!! But, what if it doesn’t recognize the queries which are not in Concierge NLP but trained in the primary bot?

Perhaps setting a lower threshold of concierge NLP can crack the puzzle?

OR

2. Copy all the utterances of each bot as an intent of the Concierge bot?

This should match the intent correctly for most of the utterances.

But, we have few issues –

a. The NLP of Concierge bot gets huge as the number of chatbots increases.

b. Training the utterances at two places (chatbot and concierge bot)

c. NLPs will have the data storage limit

d. Splitting the NLP into 2 or more would also lead to complexities

Did our solutions work?

3. Concierge bot without an NLP but, directly accessing the NLPs of respective chatbots

Let’s go look again at the Img3 of 3 separate chatbots. Why can’t we reuse the same NLP from the respective chatbot instead of making a different NLP for the concierge bot?

Yes, pass the user sentence directly to all the NLPs of the chatbots in parallel. This can be done by making a single asynchronous call to all of the NLPs and collecting the confidence scores of each bot at the intent level. It not only tells which bot is the best match but also which intent is the exact match for the given sentence.

Let’s assume the confidence score of an intent as α (alpha)

if α ≥ 85%*, prompt to confirm if multiple, else directly connect with bot

else if 75%* ≤ α ≤ 84%*, prompt to confirm even if one

else if α ≤ 74%*, ask user to rephrase the sentence

* threshold values can be set as per our requirement

As seen in the Img7, for the user question “How do I apply for leaves in my timesheet?”, all of the respective chatbot’s NLP returned confidence scores, and the highest match is with Intent1–92% of HR Bot, which is greater than our threshold value, so the concierge bot connects with the HR Bot for rest of the conversation.

I hope, that cleared!

Consider 6 different bots returning confidence scores where 2 are greater than the threshold. Refer to the image below, where a user is having trouble accessing the timesheet page. This could be related to HR Bot if the problem is with his access, or IT Support Bot if the problem is with the network or browser. So the query has matched intent from both bots with >85% confidence and as per our condition “prompt to confirm if multiple”, will prompt the user to confirm what exactly they meant.

Few NLPs don’t provide intent scores

During my assessment of various NLP-based chatbots on the market, I discovered that the majority of NLPs return confidence scores, but few don’t. Those bots would either return the matching intent name or a fallback if none of the intents fit.

Since we’re dealing with multiple chatbots, regardless of which NLP is used to predict the user’s context, our approach to create a concierge bot remains the same.

Imagine each bot is developed with different NLP and the results/scores are as below. The condition still remains almost the same.

Let’s assume the confidence score of an intent as α (alpha)

if α ≥ 85%* + Intents, prompt to confirm if multiple, else directly connect with bot

else if 75%* ≤ α ≤ 84%* + Intents, prompt to confirm even if one

else if α ≤ 74%* + Intents, ask user to rephrase the sentence

* threshold values can be set as per our requirement

Here,

intents whose score is greater than the threshold (85%) i.e., Intent3 (from IT Support Bot)

+

intents returned by few exceptional bots i.e., Intent3 and Intent2 from Banking Bot and Insurance Bot respectively.

In total, 3 intents are matched. As a result, make these intents available to users as button choices, and attach them to the bot that the user chooses. The conversation starts !!!

That’s it.

I hope that provided a favorable idea to deal with multiple chatbots. Let me know in the comments what do you think about it. Thanks for reading.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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Concierge Bot: Handle Multiple Chatbots from One Chat Screen was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Conversational marketing is a process of enchanting online visitors and transforming the leads through conversation-determined proceedings. It aims to form the client’s best relationship by developing trust through the discussions and creating the shopping experience at ease more dynamically and engagingly than any other methods. Chatbots are the most reliable and popular tool used for the same.

Chatbot marketing is a quick way to shift purchasers via healthier, humanoid, and engaging conversations. It also helps in seamless lead generation; means a conversational bot will be 24/7 available and help visitors in better rapport building, which gives a personalized experience to all customers.

Chatbot As A Marketing & Management Tool

The traditional ways of marketing days are gone. Today is the era of conversational marketing, which helps in engagement through text and graphical conversational messages just like humans interactions. The truth is many people like to interact in such a way as this is more comfortable, fast and allows healthy conversations between customers and business.

Around 90% of consumers prefer to use conversational marketing tactics as a business model, and they prefer email form says Twilio.

The truth is that buyers and customers do not have sufficient time for the traditional marketing channel in this fast-paced world, and just 45% of persons respond appropriately to cold calls. Also, on average, the email access rate lowered to 20%, and lastly, it is found that in the landing pages, the conversation rate is around 2.35% in traditional channels of marketing.

Thus, B2B getting methods have occurred as impersonal and cold, and dreadful to the buyer.

What is a Focus Group?

A focus group is a gathering where around 5% of efficient consumers get mingled with a negotiator for answering the queries on the brand, enterprise name, product, etc., for proper market research.

Here the stakeholder provides their suggestions, opinions, and criticisms to the questions raised, also the negotiator will record it. The right key for the progress will be to figure out the correct stakeholders, and you need to focus on the best-targeted market of your enterprise, such as women in the age group of 25–35 years.

When Do You Need To Carry Out A Focus Group?

• When you wish to begin a novel enterprise in the market, you are not aware of them.
• If you want to widen your enterprise in other markets.
• When you form a brand-new product, you wish to obtain feedback on the product to be packed and well-crafted.
• If you wish to find new views that aid your enterprise in developing in the existing market, you cannot think of.
• Also, when you wish to alter your entire products/ services rates, thereby avail profit in this competitive market of today.
• Lastly, if you wish to know precisely what people or audience have an opinion on your services/ products.

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Benefits of A Chatbot in Focus Group

The focus groups are very forceful since it allows you to access your focused market mindset compared with the other types of market research — the participant’s start expressing evident and deep thoughts during the discussion. Including chatbot can help make the group interactions more productive and resulting.

Now let’s see the benefits of conducting a focus group with a chatbot below:

• It could be empowering for the participants; with a chatbot, participants can communicate and share data more flexibly.
• It saves time and money, which chatbots are the best known for.
• An organizer can share basic questions details about group meet in real-time with a chatbot.

Remote Focus Group Through Videos

Figuring out a dedicated remote focus group is a great benefit for your marketing crew. One of the most common ways to organize remote focus groups is through videos.

It helps immensely in effective video marketing and runs smoothly, safely, and securely. The fantastic remote focus group follows a specific flow and lifecycle to ensure the feedback you get suits the research objectives.

You can fascinate the professional audience with indigenous videos at all stages of a purchase voyage through video advertising. Thus, building brand awareness with professionals can be made easier, acquiring well-qualified leads and obtaining customers. Therefore, using a remote focus group for video marketing can also be a good plan.

A chatbot can help share the videos with all participants and collect the analytics like who watched it and who didn’t. Participants can also ask chatbot basic questions like location, purpose, goal, other participant details, etc. A chatbot can also be used to take attendance, raise query tickets, etc.

Having a chatbot in the loop can help remote focus group meetings go smooth and even help understand the participant behavior if it has AI integrated.

You can also train chatbot to take feedback or reviews of each participant post group conference.

Three Ways To Run A Remote Focus Group

Usually, the focus group occurs in a meeting room or a large conference hall. But in these modern days, they appear virtual. Working remotely has enormous benefits to both individuals and organizations. Let us see how effectively focus groups can run.

1. Synchronous Multi-person Video Conferences

It is a widespread way to run the remote focus group effectively. Here all the participants have the conversation for the same duration. The best example for this conference type is live video or phone conference and computer-assisted conference.

2. Asynchronous Interview Formats

This communication mode permits the interviewer to ask the pre-recorded questions through video format. Thus, it’s evident that the focus group does not have the feasibility of conducting a live meeting.

3. Survey Panel Respondent Groups

This process involves encouraging market research solutions online to hand over to the panelist. These are the best ones for brand impression, content creation, concept testing, and product development.

Summing Up!

Thus, in this digital age period, the focus groups are valuable to the marketers, since it increases vast insights into the consumer’s interests, attitudes, perceptions, and motivations. Also, it permits a good study on why customers act in such the way they do.

The voice of the consumer is at the heart of every business decision. Thus, these remote focus groups for video marketing are highly efficient. Conversational marketing with the remote focus group helps in a genuine conversation, thereby rendering tremendous value besides several marketing funnels.

“The conversational marketing main vision is not to replace human marketers but to remain the best alternative to human efforts.”

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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Chatbot For Remote Focus Group Management was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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Did you know that LinkedIn already existed way before the likes of Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat? Despite its age, the career networking platform is far from outdated. Nowadays a staggering 94% of recruiters look at your profile in selecting potential candidates. But most of them are not human, so it seems.

The importance of a solid online profile is greater than ever. Your personal LinkedIn page serves as your digital business card and it’s the most used tool for recruiters in the selection process of new candidates. There are strict requirements, and chances are that you have already been rejected by a robot several times. A robot? Yep, you heard that right. Many companies use robo-recruiters in their search for new employees and only 2 percent of job-seekers manage to get the better of these very strict AI-driven machines. So the question is, are there ways to get past them? The answer is yes, by taking the right steps you will too get that job invite you really want.

Inevitable shift

The increasing number of Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) as these robots are officially called, results from the fact that the current job market is more competitive than ever before. Back in 2016 for example, investment bank Goldman Sachs received as many as 250.000 applications for a single vacancy. Not only are there more players entering the field, but competing candidates also tend to become more and more qualified over the years. In the US the percentage of individuals holding a bachelor’s degree or higher increased from 29 to 37 percent between 2000 and 2018, a development that stresses the need for algorithms to filter out the cream of the crop.

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1. How Chatbots and Email Marketing Integration Can Help Your Business

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4. Practical NLP for language learning

Computer says no

It may sound harsh, putting in loads of effort to make your profile tip-top only to get a firm no from a recruiter without a pulse. Unfortunately, that is how recruiting works in this digital day and age. Lucky for you, there are online tools like My Talent Path you can use to outsmart the system. This platform allows you to upload your profile to check how desirable you currently are to recruiters. Afterward, you will get feedback on how to improve by performing simple actions that will boost your score right away, making you a lot harder to ignore — even for robots.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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Beat the bots: the rise of robot recruitment was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.