In this post, we'll walk through building chatbots for your own website. By the time you're finished reading this article, you should have all the information you need to build a chatbot that can help your customers find exactly what they're looking for.

Here are some fundamental parts of building a chatbot:

Define your chatbot's purpose

A chatbot is essentially a software program that simulates human conversation. Chatbots are able to respond to messages sent by the user in real time and perform tasks based on the information provided. At their core, they're not unlike customer service agents that never sleep; they're available 24 hours a day and 7 days a week to answer questions and provide assistance. The only difference between them are the fact that they don't require breaks and their conversations aren't limited by language barriers.

The first thing you’ll need to do is define your chatbot's purpose. What will it be used for? Is it meant to help with marketing, promoting sales, and answering frequently asked questions? Or is its purpose more general, like simulating human conversation? 

If you have any experience with building a website or app before, this task should be relatively straightforward. Most importantly, you'll want to consider what your chatbot can offer that an actual human interaction can't.

Decide how your chatbot will work

The next step in developing your chatbot is to decide how you want it to work. There are different categories of technology you can use: NLP, AI, or rule-based.

NLP is the most popular method of building a bot. This works by training the chatbot with a large amount of data and then having it learn to recognize patterns in user input and provide appropriate responses. This kind of chatbot will be able to respond using its own language rather than only being able to produce pre-programmed responses like a rule-based chatbot will.

Rule-based bots are much simpler because they don’t require any training data or AI techniques but instead rely on rules that have been manually programmed into their software by developers. These types of bots have very limited capabilities when compared with other methods such as NLP so if your goal is something more advanced than just answering FAQs then you should probably look elsewhere for inspiration! However, if all you need is an automated customer service representative this might be exactly what’s right for your project!

Choose a platform to build your chatbot on

The next step in the process is to choose a chatbot platform. If you're already familiar with programming, you can build your own chatbot from scratch. It's a good way to learn about the process, and it's free, but it will take some time.

If you're not as familiar with programming or want to get up and running faster, there are plenty of options available for building a chatbot on one of various platforms. Manychat is an option that is easy to use and doesn't require any coding knowledge. You can register on their website and begin building your bot right away. There are also more advanced tools such as Dialogflow which have text-to-speech capabilities and support for follow-up questions—handy for improving customer satisfaction on websites that have complex queries or follow-up questions required by the business.

Choose a UI for your chatbot

Choosing a UI for your chatbot can be difficult, especially if you don’t know the importance of having one. The best way to choose the right UI for your chatbot is to consider how you want your users to interact with it. Do you want them to talk to it? Text it? Type in commands or press buttons? Or do you want them to navigate around a visual map and chat with it that way?

You need to decide what type of input method you would like your bot’s users to have. Your options are as follows: text input, voice input, command-line interface (CLI), graphical user interface (GUI), and multi-modal inputs. These five types of UIs make up the vast majority of all UIs out there today and are used by millions of users daily.

Create the conversation flow that's right for your brand and messaging

The flow of a conversation is its natural progression from start to end. A well-designed conversation flow can make the chatbot feel more engaging and human.

When designing your bot, a useful tool for visualizing the conversation flow is a traditional flow chart. By creating this visual representation of your bot's conversation flow, you’ll be able to see exactly how many messages need to be built and where each message fits in with the rest of the bot’s conversations.

Here are some tips for setting up a good chatbot conversation:

• Start simple - Don't jump out of the gate with a lengthy introduction that discourages users from interacting with your chatbot further, or worse: they'll simply leave!

• Organize your content - Make sure that your content makes sense and flows naturally. If there are multiple topics covered in your chatbot, give them different nodes so users can pick which topic they want to learn about next.

Check in with your chatbot regularly once it's been deployed

Beyond the hard work of building your chatbot, it’s important to continually test and improve it. Once your chatbot is deployed, you can use analytics tools to monitor performance and measure user engagement. You can also use website forms to collect feedback on your bot directly from users.

Chatbots are always a work in progress, so be ready to regularly update them with new features and improvements. Here are some examples of improvements you could make:

• Responding more effectively to user input

• Improving the conversational flow

• Adding more content or personality