There are tons of bot builders out there. But what makes some of these players excel from one another? What makes a great bot builder experience today and what should you be looking at when scouting solutions in the market?
Let’s uncover these topics together and kick off today’s Bots Fitness exercise!
What are the best bot builder solutions from 20/21?
That is a very difficult question to answer. So, after looking at a dozen of specialized magazines and blogs, I’ve decided to create my own list. Granted, inspired by the Top 20 Builders from 2020, the Top 10 Builders from 2021, the best chatbot builder list according to Zapier (one of my favorite automation tools), and of course, based or should I say influenced by some of the previous builders I have been working and playing with since 2017 and that have evolved ever since, naturally.
Bots Fitness: Feature Selection Criteria
Now that we have a list (that I will share further down), here are the features or capabilities I’m particularly interested in and that I’ll be looking at when taking these babies for a spin:
- Conversational Canvas: ability to easily design conversational journeys
- Set-Up: operational excellence for creating, testing, deploying, and maintaining Conversational AI-powered bots
- Templates: ability to create and deploy bots fast based on both pre-built models and conversational flows
- Multi-lingual: create once and deploy everywhere, in every language
- NLP, import/export grammar/corpus: the ability to leverage training sets easily and openly, regardless of their source
- NLP, testing (specifically multi-language bots): making life easier for multi-lingual bot builder users who need to toggle between languages and expect the same behavior while testing the same bot in a different language
- Important/Export Bots: the ability to import/export bots from/to different bot builder providers
- Preview Experience: practical positioning within the builder experience,
- Integration 3rd Party / Modularity: how extensible is the solution, how easy is it to bring 3rd party data onto the Bot Builder?
- Integration Channels: what reach could this solution unveil?
- Analytics: measure success, accuracy, precision, recall. Know what’s working and what’s not via a quick look at these dashboards and adapt accordingly. Receive recommendations to enhance your experience as a Bot Builder.
My goal for this Bots Fitness exercise is to do a fly-by of some of the bot builder solutions that I’m interested in these days. Cognizant that I won’t be able to cover the full list today, I’ll save a little bit more than half of the list for another article. Let’s focus on the first 4 players on the list, today.
Bots Fitness: fly-by some of the builders I’m interested in these days
The following competitive call-out brings forward elements that positively caught my attention while dry-running these solutions below. I’m keeping it telegraphic, short, and sweet. It essentially assesses if the feature selection criteria are met, IMO (of course).
- Chatfuel — Blocks, Rich Content, Integration Points (Modularity), Templates
- Dialog Flow — Multi-language, NLP Testing, Integrator Components (Modularity)
- MS Bot Framework — Power Apps (similar to templates)
- IBM Watson — Templates
Next on the list and soon flying-by
Next time, as a Bots Fitness exercise, I will overview specifically the following solutions — Many Chat, Flow XO, Drift, Intercom, Botsify, Bot Nation, Mobile Monkey, Rasa, Yellow Messenger (new scout!)
What about you?
What bot builder solution do you work with or would like to call out? I’d love to take it for a spin. Thank you for taking the time to read this piece.
Have questions? Feel free to reach out. Let’s connect on Twitter. I’ll answer DMs faster than emails. @lecharleslozano, Otherwise: carlos@bots.fit
