What is AI Chatbot & 6 Types of Chatbot | Engati

Just how we contrast in our personality and talents, the same goes for chatbots in their appearance and activities. A chatbot on an eCommerce website would be totally unlike the one for Banking!

In this blog, we’ll be touching upon what are the different types of chatbots, their applications and their functionalities. This will give you a clear understanding of chatbot classification and what would be the ideal chatbot type for your business!

What is a Chatbot?

A chatbot is a conversational tool that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and human language to understand and answer customer queries. It uses natural language processing (NLP) to form responses just like a human conversation. 

What are the different types of chatbots?

Here are the 6 different types of chatbots-

1. Menu/button-based chatbots
2. Linguistic Based (Rule-Based Chatbots)
3. Keyword recognition-based chatbots
4. Machine Learning chatbots
5. The hybrid model
6. Voice bots

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Menu/button-based chatbots are the most basic types of chatbots currently implemented in the market today. In most cases, these chatbots are glorified decision tree hierarchies presented to the user in the form of buttons. Similar to the automated phone menus we all interact with on almost a daily basis, these chatbots require the user to make several selections to dig deeper towards the ultimate answer.

While these chatbots are sufficient for answering FAQs that makeup 80% of support queries; they fall short in more advanced scenarios in which there are too many variables or too much knowledge at play to predict how users should get to specific answers with confidence. It’s also worth noting that menu/button-based chatbots are the slowest in terms of getting the user to their desired value.

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If you can predict the types of questions your customers may ask, a linguistic type bot might be the solution for you. Linguistic or rules-based chatbots create conversational automation flows using if/then logic. First, you have to define the language conditions of your chatbots. Conditions can be created to assess the words, the order of the words, synonyms, and more. If the incoming query matches the conditions defined by your chatbot, your customers can receive the appropriate help in no time. 

However, it’s your job to ensure that each permutation and combination of each question is defined, otherwise, the chatbot will not understand your customer’s input. This is why a linguistic model, while incredibly common, can be slow to develop. These chatbots demand rigidity and specificity.

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Unlike menu-based chatbots, keyword recognition-based chatbots is a one of the types of chatbot that can listen to what users type and respond appropriately. These chatbots utilize customizable keywords and an AI application - Natural Language Processing (NLP) to determine how to serve an appropriate response to the user.

These types of chatbots fall short when they have to answer a lot of similar questions. The NLP chatbots will start to slip when there are keyword redundancies between several related questions.

It is quite popular to see chatbot examples that are a hybrid of keyword recognition-based and menu/button-based. These chatbots provide users with the choice to try to ask their questions directly or use the chatbot’s menu buttons if the keyword recognition functionality is yielding poor results or the user requires some guidance to find their answer.

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Ever wondered what is a contextual chatbot? A contextual chatbot is far more advanced than the three bots discussed previously. These types of chatbots utilize Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to remember conversations with specific users to learn and grow over time. Unlike keyword recognition-based bots, chatbots that have contextual awareness are smart enough to self-improve based on what users are asking for and how they are asking it.

For example, a contextual chatbot that allows users to order food; the chatbot will store the data from each conversation and learn what the user likes to order. The result is that eventually when a user chats with this chatbot, it will remember their most common order, their delivery address, and their payment information and merely ask if they’d like to repeat this order. Instead of having to respond to several questions the user just has to answer with ‘Yes’ and the food is ready! 

While this food ordering example is elementary, it is easy to see just how powerful conversation context can be when harnessed with AI and ML. The ultimate goal of any chatbot should be to provide an improved user experience over the alternative of the status quo. Leveraging conversation context is one of the best ways to shorten processes like these via a chatbot.

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Businesses love the sophistication of AI-chatbots, but don’t always have the talents or the large volumes of data to support them. So, they opt for the hybrid model. The hybrid chatbot model is one best chatbots as it offers the best of both worlds- the simplicity of the rules-based chatbots, with the complexity of the AI-bots. 

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To make conversational interfaces even more vernacular, businesses are now beginning to use voice-based chatbots or voice bots. Voice bots have been on the rise for the last couple of years, with virtual assistants like Apple’s Siri, to Amazon’s Alexa, and why? Because of the convenience they bring. It’s much easier for a customer to speak rather than type. A voice-activated chatbot brings frictionless experiences directly to the end customer.

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So, which type of chatbot is right for you?

While deciding if a chatbot software is right for you, place yourself in the shoes of your users and think about the value they’re trying to receive. Is conversational context going to significantly impact this value? If not, then it is probably not worth the time and resources to implement at the moment.

Another thing to consider is your target user base and their UX preferences. Some users may prefer to have the chatbot guide them with visual menu buttons rather than an open-ended experience where they’re required to ask the chatbot questions directly. All the more reason to have users extensively test your chatbot before you fully commit and push it live.

The best types of chatbots that fit right is the one that best fits the value proposition you’re trying to convey to your users. In some cases, that could require enterprise-level AI capabilities; however, in other instances, simple menu buttons may be the perfect solution.

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What are some applications of Chatbots?

We've seen the list of chatbots categories that are available. Now, you're probably wondering what is the main use of chatbots? Let's look at the prime applications of chatbots for business:

Appointment scheduling or booking bots are the kind of bots you usually find in Healthcare, Airlines and Hotel industries. These are the best chatbot examples as they help customers book slots for appointments with the enterprise they communicate with.

Appointment bots are often linked to Google calendar, so when a customer books an appointment with you, it automatically gets stored in the calendar, creates an event and sends reminders to both the customer and the business representative. The HR team also uses HR chatbots to schedule interviews for recruitment purposes.

So if you have a business that requires a lot of booking and scheduling, this bot serves the purpose! Some of the chatbot types under this category are- 

This has to be one of the most popular chatbot example! When someone says the word ‘chatbot’, the first thing to pop up in our mind is that one-time we spoke to a chatbot for customer care. These types of chatbots performs all tasks a customer support representative would do. And it does them real good! Such chatbots can be added to multiple touchpoints of a customer like a self-service knowledge base, website, mobile app, etc
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Chatbot software has features such as 24/7 hour availability, quick and easy solutions, instant replies, and live chat facilities make support chatbots the ideal tool to improve customer service. It not only improves communication between businesses and customer base but also builds a rapport with them to earn customer loyalty. They also gather customer feedback and send it to your team so that you can work on the shortcomings.

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They allow your customers to easily interact with your business through stimulating conversations and also play their part in increasing sales. 

Some of the bot templates under this type of chatbots are- 

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Marketing and sales are the next most popular use-case of chatbots after customer support. So these intelligent bots are able to personalise the customer experience, have a larger engagement capacity, reach a wider audience, analyse customer feedback and data, sends relevant notifications and moves customers seamlessly through the sales funnel.

Some of the bot templates under this category are:

• eCommerce bot - Browse through products directly from your chatbot. You can send your customers images through carousels and link your website for purchases.

• Education-course bot -This bot allows prospective students to browse through various course offerings by an educational institution. The chatbot also provides details on course fees, duration and admission mode per course.

• Automotive Lead Generation bot - Automotive Lead Generation allows customers to get details on cars, features, prices etc, along with booking service.

• Real Estate bot - Collect requirements from your customers on what they are looking for.

• Quiz bot for market research - Generates a quiz around market research. It comes with attractive wallpaper and button colour customizations. Saves the answers provided by the user, calculates their score and also sends an email to the user letting them know their score.

• Social media marketing bot - A lead generation chatbot template for social media marketing agencies. Which notify the admin whenever a new lead is generated.

• Lead generation - Google helps you take user information and save it in google sheets. So the prospects are already on your product and have strong leads. So this bot will help you store that information which can be used market products to these customers or provide support to convert these leads.

• Lead generation with Salesforce - Helps you take user information and save it in Salesforce. Prospects already on your product are strong leads this bot will help you store that information which can be used market products to these customers or provide customer support to convert these leads.

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Entertainment bots are the types of chatbots that are made for entertainment and media purposes. These bots include- 

• The tv show guide - A simple yet powerful chatbot to help track channels as per category for a service provider.

• The go-karting bot -The ideal chatbot template for booking go-karting services. The bot also shows some information about tracks and karts.

• Quiz bot - Serves a quick fire round of questions to those interested in a little harmless fun dose of quiz questions. It ends with giving a quick score based on the correct answers.

• Riddle bot - To engage your customers through games to keep them coming back to your website.

• Discord bot - To welcome new members to your server, to ban troublemakers, to moderate the discussion.

• News and media bot - To help users access news from different categories. So the bot flow leads the user to news categories where they can select the desired category to access news and can also subscribe to a category.

• Cinema bot - Lets your customers book movie tickets, read reviews, browse through different genres.

• The entertainment factory - A bot that assists users with everything at their favourite getaway location. Adding ease to their fun!

• Youtube channel bot - Deploy a chatbot using this template anywhere to use it as your new social media channel to share your youtube content.

• The podcast bot - Helps the user learn about the universe with the help of podcasts or become a VIP member to get updates!

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These are just to name a few among the wide range of templates we offer! Register with Engati to build an ideal chatbot for your business and browse through 100+ bot templates in the Bot Marketplace that caters to every business need of yours. 

Many types of chatbot examples are seen everywhere today. Across many variants of businesses and enterprises. But have you ever noticed that no two chatbots are the same? Their purpose, functions, dialogue flow, the tasks they take care of, are all completely different! Why is it so? Because different business types have different requirements and needs that the chatbot has to fulfill. Nevertheless, if you think all the different chatbot types are created equally, you’re quite mistaken!

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