How Open Source Chatbot Platforms Allow Non-Developers to Author Contextual Automated Conversations

In a recent piece, I discussed the rise of chatbots and AI assistants for customer engagement and brand experience.
In response to this piece, one of my readers asked, are there any open source chatbot platforms on the market that give non-developers the chance to create their own contextual automated conversations?
The answer is yes; there are several companies that have developed conversational chatbot platforms and employ NLU (Natural Language Understanding) that can be easily accessed and used by businesses with little programming or technical expertise.
This is fantastic news for businesses who want to harness the power of chatbot technology, but don’t have the technical knowledge, or the budget to hire a programming expert to install the software on their website.

Open Source Adoption is Increasing

According to Red Hat’s State of Enterprise Open Source Survey, published in April of this year, 68% of 950 IT professionals reported an increase in the use of open source software. An additional 59% of respondents expected to see an increase in the implementation of this technology over the next year.
Open source adoption is increasing, and it’s a valid option to avoid sending all your conversations to internet giants.

Efficient Open Source Platforms

A very popular conversational AI platform is Rasa. It is an open source machine learning framework that helps to automate both text-and voice-based conversations. It helps businesses build contextual, layered conversations with plenty of back-and-forth interactions. However, Rasa is fairly complex to use and is a lower level developer-oriented tool.
If you’re non-technical like me or if you’re after something more visual, there could be an element of fear when it comes to creating an open source chatbot to use in a professional capacity. But during my research for this piece, I discovered Botfront. Botfront is a free and open source chatbot platform built on top of the Rasa library.
It allows users to both design and implement conversations in real-time, with a straightforward interface that even I could use to start automating responses. Within five minutes of using this software, I was able to create my first auto-response, dedicated to Towards Data Science!
Image Source: Author

Bridging the Gap

That’s where products such as Botfront come in handy. They help non-technical users and writers like myself and many others to work with Rasa and create conversational AI models easily as non-developers.
The problem with dev-oriented platforms is that they are powerful, but they are not for everybody. Then there are “build a bot in 10 minutes” solutions that are easy to use but very limited in their capabilities.
Software such as Botfront offers a super intuitive conversation authoring interface. Users write the conversation instead of assembling a series of flow charts; that’s one feature that really made this free software stand out for me. And ease of use doesn’t come at the price of functionalities.

Additional Benefits of Open Source Chatbot Platforms

It’s fantastic when everything is displayed on one interface, in layman’s terms, and the user can build a visual conversation and then try it out in real-time.
It’s even better when there are branching and linking options that allow you to build a chatbot that can have various sentiment responses and conversation loops.
The documentation helped a lot. It explains fundamental concepts in not too technical terms and I was able to install the software quite easily, it just took me a moment to figure out the installation requirements.
Image Source: Botfront.io
Once you’ve built your chatbot via Botfront, you can integrate it into your website with ease using the Rasa webchat widget.

Making AI More Accessible

This software is a prime example of how companies are making AI more accessible to non-technical people. It helps to instill confidence in creating fantastic pieces of marketing equipment or customer service interfaces for people with all levels of technical knowledge.
It’s undeniable that the successful adoption of chatbots by consumers has led to the use of more and more bots globally. This has been seen in advanced artificial intelligence technologies and their application within custom software development companies. It has been reported that 80–85% of businesses will be utilizing sophisticated chatbots by 2020.
Let’s hope that excellent open source software that makes the creation and integration of these brilliant versions of AI accessible continue to thrive.

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