Chatbots are an enormous new trend and an excellent thanks to facilitating the growth of your digital marketing and branding efforts.

What are chatbots?

A chatbot is in simple terms a chunk of software that's programmed to be told, grow, and simulate human behaviors in an exceedingly conversational form over an online or mobile-based chat app.

What are chatbots getting used for?

Chatbots are growing year on the year together with computer science and are expected to stay growing over the subsequent few years following the AI boom. an idea of AI may be a small amount complicated if you’ve never worked with it before. you would possibly learn more about AI and chatbots, specifically, if you'd prefer to understand the way this works

Chatbots are being employed for everything from chat assistance on websites helping with inquiries and merchandise information all the way through to taking online bookings and acting as virtual sales assistants.

Why are chatbots such an enormous opportunity?
Research from Peter Rojas over at Betaworks shows that AI and chatbots are now the most platforms, rather than Social Media platforms, that folks are spending their time – this is often why chatbots became such an enormous opportunity.

Amongst other free digital marketing tools, there are a variety of free chatbots you'll get.

This makes perfect sense as it’s where the people are – So you market using the correct media to urge your message to your market.

How do chatbots work?

Although chatbots use AI to grow and learn lots of it comes right down to some simple rules and triggers that you simply pre-program within your chatbot.

There are limitations though.

Chatbots that are built purely on rules don’t grow as pure AI-based learning chatbots.

It will only be as clever as you program it to be and therefore the specifics of the programming might not allow the bot to answer questions outside of a particular pre-text.

Pure AI-driven chatbots to grow and learn on the task, you don’t must be specific, and that they are able to piece elements together to administer a really accurate answer as if it were a personality's.

That is a really oversimplified version of what a chatbot is and there will be plenty of data to run through and analyze to fine-tune and ensure your bot is growing.

Whether it's for customer support, selling an item, or fetching and retrieving specific information – A bot is often built and pre-programmed for any specific cause.

A chatbot handling customer service and online sales save the necessity for extra in-house staff and streamline your costs.

The evolution of the chatbot

Chatbots are around for a real while, as far back as 1966, and evolved into systems such as the Microsoft paperclip and Apples Siri.
Siri is where it all began and began the 000 big chatbot movement.

Siri is ready to process all kinds of requests from calling someone to writing a text message or finding your search results on Google.
The evolution of AI has led these chatbots to now not just reply to keywords pre-programmed but to essentially understand, almost like how a person would and respond in a very logical way.

2018 and 2019 saw a large rise within the usage of chatbots as Facebook messenger became one of every of the primary mainstream and accessible chatbots to be employed by businesses.

It allowed website owners to try and do all varieties of cool things including answering basic questions like opening times, products, prices, and also connecting to a personality's when required.

These bots will only get smarter as they slowly (or quickly) learn the way to piece things together sort of a human would.

What can chatbots do?

The main idea behind a chatbot is to act as a natural interlocutor between the AI chatbot and your website's user with the goal of appearing as natural as possible.

The main things chatbots can do include:

-Saving you time and money not needing additional support staff to pander to your chat support requests and offer things like discounts and retrieve product links.
-Provide 24/7 support.
-Provide an immediate response and respond quicker than a personality could.
-Reduce friction – If you wish to gather data, then an online form would be the everyday way, but a chatbot could collect identical information without the requirement for an online form.

Chatbots aren’t human, they’re designed to be very helpful to the side user and save time for the backend website owner, because the technology gets better so will the AI chatbot interaction.

5 best uses of a chatbot

Chatbots, well AI, and also the technology behind chatbots will be used for several things, not just website live chats, here are some samples of some best uses of a chatbot.

-Ordering food – With tools like Alexa and Google Home, you'll order nutrition through them with very minimal friction. Simply ask “Alexa, order me a meat feat from Pizza hut” and it is done.
-Storing messages – Using identical devices, you'll be able to store messages in voice form for reproducing at a later date. This has been emphasized within the Amazon Alexa TV adverts when the Alexa is employed to remind an elderly gentleman about an occasion later that night.
-Telling you your favorite sports scores – The devices can pull out data like tomorrow and also the results to your favorite football teams match or the Formula 1 race results can all be requested at the tone of your voice.
-Getting the weather/TV – additionally, as being sued to test au fait your favorite sports team, chatbots can provide you with TV listings for your favorite channels and also tell you the forecast for that day.
-Ecommerce shopping – Chatbots is accustomed place orders online on your favorite eCommerce websites, and also the great point is, variety of online eCommerce stores like Amazon have even started using Facebook Messenger rather than emails for orders confirmations!

Chatbots and digital marketing

Chatbots can’t build backlinks for your SEO services or do outreach for you – But there are some benefits that chatbots bring around digital marketing.

Chatbots will be accustomed to free your time, unlock your staff and quite simply streamline and automate your digital marketing efforts.

Using bots to assemble data, organize data, and piece it all at once for your upcoming marketing campaign could save your hours.

There are automated chatbots that job on Social Networks and automatically message your contacts, engage in conversation, and do to an extent, elements of lead generation for you.

This reveals the number of simultaneous conversations your company could have with prospects for little cost.

Chatbots may also be used as mentioned previously, to answer FAQs, provide links to products/services that you simply offer, greet visitors as they land on your website, and even schedule meetings/calls/appointments on your behalf.

Can AI design websites?

AI can to an extent design websites and in the future could change the way websites are designed. Does this mean the top of web designers? Probably not, but the way during which websites are designed could certainly change.

It uses something called ADI – Artificial Design Intelligence which uses AI to automate elements of the net design process.

The theory is that the machine learning behind ADI will understand web design trends and patterns and build an internet site automatically based on this understanding.

How this can tie into User Experience, use of colors and actual conversions is yet to be seen.

As it stands the sole 2 ways to style an internet site are to rent an internet designer or learn to make it yourself, ADI aims to create doing it yourself far easier.

Expect the ADI trend to grow over the approaching years together with AI and therefore the use of AI and chatbots.

There are plenty of ways to use a chatbot, Siri was one in every of the primary, chatbots aren’t just there to use on website live chat messaging systems, but may also be used for several other things and are available with incredible money and time-saving benefits that humans just can’t match.