What is a chatbot?
‍A chatbot is a (ro)bot which is an interactive program that talks to you and answers requests. Bots are also referred to as “digital query assistants”, “conversational UI” or “conversational commerce”. They answer naturally to requests so that it feels like a conversation. Their topic depends on the business’ focus and could be a news bot, an online-shop assistant or a hotel reservation bot for example. It is not complicated, but as customers’ expectations rise, all businesses need to understand that they are no longer going to be satisfied with waiting hours and hours for calls to be answered, today the chatbot is here to stay and take care of your customer’s query quickly and efficiently. In today’s context, chatbots are fun to be with and can help the customers achieve what they want. Today, use of chatbots is seen as an easy and fun way to help customers achieve an outcome. You’ll encounter them on web sites, social media and even on your smartphone. Say hello to Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana, and Alexa, to name a few examples of the most advanced chatbots we see.
How many users can a chatbot support?
‍Many users can be supported and their queries are answered at the same time. So a chat bot can support one query or one thousand queries at the same time and beyond. All with a consistent responses and the same logic across the board so you have the same quality of customer service every single time.
How do you handle security and threats?
‍Consumers are already using chatbots on a range of messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Siri, etc. It is a well-known fact that security is an important concern for any technology and looking at the way the tech trends are moving, the concern and security around chatbots becomes equally important. They are a new technology in terms of a user using it, but the fact is that they operate on standard and secured internet protocols that have been around for a long time. With every web technology, security threats will always be there.  It’s an inescapable fact of life that all systems have weaknesses. However, with careful safeguarding of attack vectors, security vulnerabilities can be mitigated. Also the platforms themselves such as Google Assistant are incredibly robust and diligent in their approach to new applications.
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Do you need speech recognition features?
‍Looking at the recent trends happening around, the voice-based virtual assistants have become popular amongst all. For example: Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Google Assistant, and Amazon’s Alexa are now accessible to the masses and can carry out an ever-increasing number of tasks. With the rising popularity of voice-activated devices for the home (such as the Amazon Echo and Google Home), voice-activated chatbots will only become more prevalent and sophisticated.Voice will be a major input method for the future now that the recognition performance is incredibly accurate now.
What if the chatbot is not working or out of one’s reach?
‍When a voice-activated device isn’t available or doesn’t work, one can take the help of a simple text message to communicate rather than talk or use speech based recognition inputs. As we all know, there are text-based conversations which are already existing. One could send a simple message to a chatbot across various messaging platforms, from mobile messaging apps like Facebook Messenger to plain old SMS messaging. With chatbots now in the picture and providing a future-ready artificial intelligence technology, it becomes nonetheless very important to understand the various functionalities and also get acquainted with the latest tech norms and make oneself adaptable to the same.
Where is the chatbot be hosted?
‍There are two options available for the deployment; Cloud and On-Premise. Cloud deployment can be carried out by using Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud or Amazon; this is our recommended route as it allows for the scalability of the bot to handle lots of requests. On-Premise will be carried out using your private windows servers if required, but will probably need some aspects to be hosted on the platforms themselves. But data and most of the logic can be held locally to you.
What kind of features can be included in a chatbot?
‍There are lots of features that can be used in your chatbot from conversational data-capture to self-service account-management. All can be accessed using a natural language interface that can cover lots of languages for both text and voice.You can add a large portion of customer-service elements to your bot to ensure that most of your first stage enquiries can be answered quickly and accurately every time with more complicated queries building up over time.
How can a chatbot be used?
‍There are so many uses for a chatbot, that it would be difficult to list them. But you can have chatbots at every stage of your business, from marketing and sales through to after-sales and support. If you look at sectors then for finance, then you would have great marketing opportunities to give first stage product details or accessibility criteria, you could even capture the lead partially and have the opportunity to follow-up and drop-offs. In ecommerce, there would be a huge opportunity to up-sell and cross-sell with your virtual sales assistant. The largest use-case comes from answering your general queries quickly at any time and with very controlled standards. This is useful for any business B2B or B2C  
How do you monitor the success of a chatbot?
‍We provide a range of monitors dependant on the bot and the areas that we need to measure.But a lot of these boil down to getting some of the nice clear technical functions smoothly first and go from there.These may include:• Error Logs • Zero Intent Logs • Success Dashboards• Chat Logs. As the journey develops then you would then also be able to see how much impact that you have on sales and enquiry performance or post sales support or general customer interaction.
Why a chatbot and not an app?
‍900 million monthly active users of Facebook Messenger and 300 million users of Skype can request coffee-shop and restaurant recommendations without having to go to any app store. They can just directly interact with Mica. One big adoption barrier for apps is that you have to get people to the app store to download your app. The whole process of downloading apps is quite complicated and tedious for many people. Taking this into account, 2019 sees 20% of the brands dumping their apps in favour of developing applications the sit on top of messaging platforms as a lot of the adoption barriers suddenly disappear.
Are people used to chatting to a bot?
‍As the smart speakers are the fastest growing technology adoption in history, it seems that people are very comfortable with this interface. Remember they are just talking to something and we have been talking for quite some time! With Google you just need to know what you are looking for and it is instantly there, unlike the enabling of a ‘skill’ on Amazon Echo, this makes it the new point to find your business or service.