In the past, chatbots were just a fun novelty that didn't do anything useful, but now they're an essential tool in the business world with more than 1.4 billion people using chatbots every day. To deliver exceptional results and experiences, chatbots have grown in sophistication, which directly translates into becoming harder to develop and run, costing you a lot more money and hours of work. 

In 2022 the lion's share of customer service interactions are conducted by conversational AI agents, leaving consumers confused about whether their last customer support interaction was with a chatbot or a real person. Forbes estimates the chatbot market will reach $1.25 billion in 2025. What makes them so valuable? A chatbot can improve customer interactions and keep them interested with less human help. It gets rid of the problems that can come up when user demand is higher than the available human chat resources. Customers don't have to wait on hold to get answers to their questions. Instead, they can get them right away. 

The business case to implement chatbots is a done deal, so now you have to think about the best way to start using chatbots and integrate them seamlessly with your products, services, and solution offerings. In this article, we cover how to use conversational AI in the real world by employing chatbot APIs, what they can do to benefit your business, and some of the most prominent chatbot APIs you can use today for your chatbot needs.

Why do you need to use Chat Bot API

In the last few years, on-demand messaging has grown quickly, which has changed the way people talk to brands. More and more businesses are using chatbots as part of their processes to give better customer service. Let’s kick things off with a definition of an API first. An API, which is also called an application programming interface, is a way for programs to talk to each other. An API basically sends your message or request to the website or app you're using and gets you the response. 

A chatbot API is an API that lets developers easily access chatbots by giving them the tools to do so. Chatbot APIs help use natural language processing (NLP) to make a chatbot that works well with the human involved in the chat. The API takes the request, figures out what it means, and sends the response.

Chatbot APIs let developers use NLP to respond to the user based on what the user was trying to say. So, any request or statement made by the user is basically turned into some kind of action with the help of the API (informing the user about the weather, placing an order, or even answering a general question).

Advantages and disadvantages of using Chatbot APIs

Let’s start with the positives of employing chatbots in your operations:

1. Help you learn more about your clients: Chatbots that can talk can help you learn more about your customers. They let you know what their questions and needs are, as well as what products or services they're interested in, plus any customer issues or concerns, and they help you make strategic decisions to improve the experience.
2. Enhance customer satisfaction: Everyone is different, and so is the way they talk to each other. That's why it's important to answer each question in a way that shows you care. For instance, our conversational AI can understand slang and regional terms, improve conversations and figure out what each interaction is about.
3. Help keep costs down: Imagine that your agents spent more time answering only the questions that needed a person. Using a Chatbot with conversational AI is a great way to automate customer service and improve the service agents give, which will lead to cost optimization in the long run.
4. Offer customer service at any time: One of the best things about Chatbots is that they can help customers around the clock. Plus, they answer all of the questions quickly. This makes sure that your customers can solve their problems, no matter what time it is.
5. Great way to make more money: Your Chatbot can be a great partner to help you promote new products and send out alerts. They can also help your potential customers right away and speed up the process of making a decision to buy.

Now, let’s review some of their drawbacks:

1. Chatbots are not people: Clearly, chatbots are not people and this is something that you must always remember. Conversational chatbots, while very capable, will not always be able to understand human interactions as well as humans can. Humans are nuanced in their communications, which can sometimes lead to chatbot confusion if they don’t understand the question or have a limited number of answers. At the end of the day, it’s a machine and you may sometimes have results that make it sound like a machine. 
   

   Tip: the more you invest in teaching your chatbot to meet user needs, the better the business outcomes will be for them and for you.

2. Implementation times are lengthy: Even though this isn’t a clear drawback, it’s still worth keeping in mind when planning to employ a chatbot. All good things take time to work perfectly and show real results so it can take a while for a chatbot to be set up, implemented, and learning.
3. Maintenance all the time: Chatbots need to be updated, fixed, and made better all the time, both in terms of what they know and how they should talk to customers. You have to give the chatbot new and useful information so it can answer customer questions.

Most popular Chatbot APIs

Before you can make a chatbot, you have to figure out what it needs to do. There are many chatbot APIs that can help you, and many chat-based networks have APIs that you can use on their platform.

Facebook Messenger API

This API is free to use and easy to work with. It lets developers make tools that let Facebook Messenger users send and receive messages. With the help of this API, you can even make chatbots that can talk to people on Messenger by themselves.

Key features:

• The Facebook Messenger API lets developers make chatbots that can talk to a group of people and chat with them automatically.
• When bots use the API, they can handle many different requests.
• With API, you can make bots that can post to groups and send notifications.
• You can also use the Facebook Messenger API to make a bot that can answer real-time questions and do other things listed in the comment box.
• It is easy to use and doesn't cost anything. There’s plenty of documentation available. 

Slack Bot API

Slack is another messaging app that teams use to manage how they talk to each other. You can use the Slack API to make Slack chatbots that can talk to customers and do tasks on their own. You can also use the Slack bot to run programs on your server, and it will tell you the results. You can do a lot with the Slack bot much like big companies who have their own Slack bot including Microsoft, IBM, and others.

Key features: 

• Create chatbots that talk to users with ease. 
• With the Slack API, create a chatbot that has a name, personality traits, and a face.
• Build chatbots that send messages, post messages, and upload files without any human help.
• Connect Slack chatbots with Facebook.
• Build bots with the help of user-friendly documentation from the Slack API.
• Connect to a large bot market to help people remember your brand.

Amazon Lex

Amazon Lex is a service that lets you build chatbots that can have conversations and add them to any app. The platform helps make text and voice-based interfaces that can talk to each other. With Amazon Lex APIs, you can make conversational chatbots that are very smart.

Key features:

• It uses deep learning and natural language processing.
• It lets you build sophisticated chatbots with features like Amazon Alexa.
• Amazon Lex turns speech into text.
• By using the platform, you can improve contact center productivity and quality.
• The platform manages infrastructure by scaling up on its own.

Microsoft Bot framework

The Microsoft Bot framework facilitates enterprise-grade artificial intelligence bots. It is an open-source framework that lets you build bots with cognitive abilities. It is good for simple bots that can listen, speak, and understand. It will let you link Slack, Facebook Messenger, SMS, email, and other services. The bots created using Bot Framework can also use Azure cognitive services for training. You can make IT systems work together with secure and scalable bots.

Key features:

• The bots can be made using REST APIs as well as an SDK.
• Bot framework has a strong developer community.

Hangouts Chat API

Google has an API for Hangouts Chat that can be used to make chatbots for Hangouts. The API has everything you need to make useful bots. These bots talk to customers through platforms like Google Hangouts. It also gives you access to Gmail, Maps, YouTube, and other Google services.

Key features:

• The API makes things easier for the user by posting messages and automatically taking care of tasks.
• Use of it is free.

Telegram Bot API

Telegram is a well-known messaging app that people use to talk to each other privately. Using the Telegram API, you can make bots that work on Telegram and do different things. The chatbot can send messages and connect to other APIs, such as a weather API, a YouTube API, etc. You can set up slash commands and bots can be very interactive. There are already a lot of bots on Telegram, such as the Gmail bot, the Wiki bot, the Music bot, and more.

Key features:

• With a Telegram bot API, you could get news and notifications that fit your needs.
• You can use the API to make games or accept payments.
• You can make tools that do things like translate and predict the weather.
• It is an API that can be used for free.
• It also has examples of documents that can be used to make bots.

WhatsApp chatbot API

You can use the available no-code bot builder for WhatsApp that lets you make and use complex decision trees on WhatsApp. Thus, your team can focus on important tasks while the bot answers repetitive questions quickly and accurately.

Key features:

• The ability to add multiple agents. Give your team a single, easy-to-use, and productive workspace where they can work together.
• Plug in and use. Connects with payment, order management, or CRM tools and can be used to talk in real time about order updates, refunds, and more.
• Analyze and Optimize. Learn from customer touchpoints and make decisions that are important to your business.

Wit.AI API

It is an open-source project that Facebook is putting together. NLP is used by this API to make bots that can talk with people. People can also send text messages to these bots. You can also teach this chatbot new words and phrases using Natural Language Processing.

Key features:

• When this API is used to make bots, they are smart enough to talk to users.
• When this API is used to make bots, they can support many different languages.
• With the help of API, you can create chatbots based on both voice and text.
• You can add these bots to any platform that lets you send messages.

Brainshop.AI 

The chatbots made using the Brainshop.ai API provide artificial intelligence support and customized bots. The chatbots developed using Brainshop can easily integrate with applications. It allows your applications to converse with your customers in a friendly manner and helps them better understand your product. Brainshop.ai bots can understand human words and respond in natural language.

Key features:

• The Chatbots made using this API are quite similar to Cortana and Siri.
• Bots created with the API’s help have an active “brain” to use when training bots.

Wrapping up

Chatbots have quickly become important parts of the business world. Most of the time, they make it much easier to solve outstanding customer issues and take a lot of manual work away from live support agents. So, they shouldn't be seen as people's replacements. Instead, they should be seen as ways to make people better.

There are a lot of steps, procedures, and development steps that go into making a chatbot. And with chatbot APIs, we can easily connect to libraries, data, and other services to build the right bot for your business, project, or even just for fun.

At Svitla Systems, we have ample experience helping organizations, from enterprises to startups, develop the right chatbot for their unique needs. With the help of our experts in integrating key business functions with chatbot APIs, our clients now benefit from having them embedded in chat, email, SMS texts, and other environments. Before you embark on your chatbot project, reach out to our representatives who can provide further details on the services Svitla Systems offers you for your chatbot needs.