Whether on Facebook Messenger, their website or even via SMS - more and more brands are using chatbots to serve their customers, market their brands and even sell their products.
Although most chatbots can handle moderately demanding conversations such as greeting conversations and product recognition interactions, the if / then logic that supports their conversational skills can be limiting. For example, if a customer asks a clear but urgent question that you didn't consider when designing the logic of your chatbot, there is no way they'll be able to answer their question, which will leave your customer hanging out to dry and ultimately dissatisfied with your customer service.
Fortunately, the next advancement in chatbot technology that can solve this problem is gaining momentum - chatbots powered by AI.
Leveraging machine learning and NLP, AI-assisted chatbots can understand the intent behind your customers' needs, take into account the entire conversation history of each customer when interacting with them, and respond to their questions in a natural, human way.
If you're currently using a standard chatbot but want to upgrade to an AI powered chatbot, we've compiled a list of the best AI chatbots for 2021. Read on to find the right one for you.
1. HubSpot
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HubSpot has simple and powerful chat builder software that you can use to automate and scale live chat conversations. Your customers can get answers to frequently asked questions, book meetings, and navigate the website. At the same time, their responses are stored in your CRM so you can qualify leads and trigger automation. Note that HubSpot's Chat Builder software doesn't quite fall under the AI Chatbot category as it uses a rules-based system. However, HubSpot has snippets of code that you can use to take advantage of the powerful AI of third-party NLP-powered bots like Dialogflow.
Since HubSpot is a CRM platform, using the HubSpot chatbot in conjunction with code fragments offers you the advantage of easy integration into your marketing, sales and service tools.
2. Intercom
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Intercom is software that supports live chat, chat bots, and more to deliver messenger-based experiences to potential customers. Using machine learning and behavioral data, Intercom can answer up to 33% of all queries while providing a personalized experience.
3. Watson Assistant
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Watson Assistant was developed by IBM, one of the leading companies in the field of AI, and is one of the most advanced chatbots with AI support on the market. Pre-trained with content from your industry, Watson Assistant can understand your historical chat or call logs, search your knowledge base for an answer, ask customers for more clarity, refer them to human representatives, and even give you training recommendations that you can improve on Conversational skills.
Watson Assistant runs on your website, messaging channels, customer service tools, and the mobile app. The chatbot also comes with a visual dialog editor so you don't need any programming experience to develop it.
4. Drift
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Drift offers conversational marketing and sales software based on both automation (rule-based) and artificial intelligence (NLP). According to their website, "Drift's conversational AI is trained in over 6 billion conversations to identify the patterns that are engaging visitors and turning them into qualified pipelines." This means that the machine learning that the chatbot is delivered with is pre-trained and ready to use.
5. Bold360
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Relying on clients like Intuit, Edible Arrangements and Vodafone, Bold360 patented its own natural language processing technology to help brands create chatbots that understand your customers' intent without keyword matching and learn how to get the most accurate answers.
Bold360's conversational AI can interpret complex languages, remember the context of an entire conversation, and respond to customers with natural answers. Customers can even buy your products through the chatbot. You can also give your chatbot its own personality and run it on most messaging channels.
6. Zendesk Chat
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Zendesk offers live chat and chatbots as part of its Zendesk chat service. With powerful automation combined with Answer Bot and Flow Builder's technology to create AI-powered conversation flows, you can configure your chatbot to answer frequently asked customer questions without writing any code.
7. Salesforce Einstein
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Salesforce Einstein is an AI technology that uses predictive intelligence and machine learning to power many Salesforce features, including Salesforce's Service Cloud and chatbot offerings. It's capable of resolving customer queries with its intelligent conversation capabilities, and you can rely on it for triage and routing, as well as data-driven insights.
8. Rulai
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Ruali, an AI-enabled chatbot for corporate brands, has a deep learning-based understanding of natural language and adaptive multi-take capabilities. He can understand the context of a conversation, predict user behavior, capture customer preferences, take action and switch to various tasks, and ask customers for further clarification.
Rulai also integrates with most messaging channels, customer service software, enterprise software, and cloud storage platforms. You can either create a Ruali chatbot from scratch with its drag-and-drop design console and have its AI customized to suit your customers, or you can implement a pre-trained chatbot that has fed in data from your industry.
9. LivePerson
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By collecting over 20 years of messaging transcript data and feeding it into the chatbot with AI support, LivePerson can automate the messaging of almost all industries and into most messaging channels like your website, mobile app, Apple Business Chat, text messaging and Google Rich Integrate business news, Line, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Google AdLingo.
LivePerson's BotStudio lets you create chatbots from scratch without any programming knowledge. The analytics dashboard can track metrics such as real-time sentiment, bot containment rate, bot conversation time, total conversation time, average order value, and bot-containing sales.You can track the impact of your chatbot on your company's bottom line.
10. Inbenta
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Inbenta's chatbot is specifically designed for corporate brands and uses machine learning and its own natural language processing engine to understand the context of each customer conversation and accurately answer their questions. Inbenta also offers a dialog manager that allows you to create custom conversation flows and paths.
When the Inbenta chatbot detects that one of your customers needs to speak to a human, the conversation is forwarded to the appropriate support agent. To make your chatbot appear more human, create a custom avatar for it as well.
11. Ada
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Ada is an AI-assisted chatbot that is trusted by customers like Medium, Shopify, and MailChimp. He has a drag-and-drop builder that you can use to train him, add GIFs to specific messages, and save customer data.
Ada can also be integrated with most messaging channels and customer service software, sending personalized content to your customers, collecting customer feedback and reporting on time, labor and cost savings of your bots. According to their website, Ada has saved its customers over $ 100 million in savings and 1 billion minutes of customer service.
12. Vergic
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Vergic offers an AI-assisted chatbot that can serve as the first line of customer support for your business, handle transactional chats, and relay more complicated issues to your actual customer service reps. It's like a hybrid chatbot that can increase the productivity of your employees.
Leveraging natural language processing and understanding of natural language, Vergic can also conduct sentiment analysis, share documents, highlight pages, manage conversation workflows, and report on chatbot analytics.
Editor's Note: This post was originally published in March 2019 and has been updated for completeness.