In this article, I will explain the Amazon Lex service and how you can use it to develop automated bots for your application. Using Lex, it is to develop automated support in your application to collect information from the user using text or voice and address the user’s concerns. I will create a sample application using Angular, and then we will integrate it to Amazon Lex to create an appointment.
Prerequisites
This article assumes that you have a basic understanding of web application development. This article doesn’t require you to have advanced skills using Angular or Amazon Web Services, but having familiarity with these technologies will help you get the most out of this. Here is a list of tools technologies I have used in this article.
Are you looking for the best chatbot software for your site?
Chatbots allow you to free up time by automatically answering common customer questions. They can also be used to generate leads, improve user experience, and make more sales.
In this article, we have handpicked the best AI chatbots software for your WordPress site to improve customer experience and boost conversions.
ChatBot allows you to easily make chatbots using their drag and drop chatbot builder. You don’t need to do any coding or have any special technical skills.
It even comes with pre-built templates that you can use as a starting point to quickly get your AI ChatBot up and running. These templates include different scenarios like selling products, customer service, recruitment, bookings, and more.
ChatBot integrates with your WordPress website and can be used along with top live chat software well as other popular apps that you may be using to grow your business.
ChatBot is also a great chatbot for Facebook messenger powered by the same AI-driven software. This gives you a powerful tool to retarget customers on Facebook, collect data, and spend money wisely on Facebook ads.
They offer a free 14-day trial (no credit card required) which helps you try it out before choosing a paid plan.
Integrating ChatBot within our own businesses is a big priority for us currently. ChatBot is a great tool for us because it lets us seamlessly forward users to our live support teams where needed.
Pricing: ChatBot costs from $50 per month, which includes 1 active chatbot and 1000 chats per month.
ManyChat is a Facebook messenger chatbot builder. With more than 1.3 Billion people using Facebook Messenger, it allows you to have a wider reach and more powerful retargeting options on the Facebook platform.
In simpler words, it helps you make sales, decrease cart abandonment, capture leads, and more by using Facebook Messenger.
It comes with a simple drag and drop interface which makes it super easy to set up a chatbot for your Facebook page. You can automatically welcome new users, point them to products, schedule messages, respond to specific keywords, and much more.
Pricing: ManyChat has a free plan that you can use to get started. This includes basic quick-start templates, 2 drip sequences, and up to 10 tags for audience segmentation. The premium plan has unlimited drip sequences and tags, plus split testing, buy buttons, and more.
Freshchat allows you to build chatbots for WhatsApp, Messenger, Apple Business Chat, mobile, and web.
It is powered by Freddy, their artificial intelligence algorithm. It is designed to detect intent and engage with the customer, rather than simply being intended to free up the time of your live chat agents.
Using their machine learning technology, Freshchat can even provide you with a list of customer and prospect questions that need precise or better answers.
Pricing: You will need Freshchat’s ‘Forest’ plan for enterprises to use their chatbot. This isn’t cheap, at $69 per user per month when billed monthly.
Drift lets you combine live chat and an automated chatbot, like many of the tools on this list. It also integrates with the most popular CRMs and email marketing services.
Drift allows you to proactively start conversations with customers that are already engaged with the products or services on your website. It is designed to use conversations for conversions and allows you to create scenarios that help you get more sales.
It offers integrations with many third-party tools such as Zendesk, Help Scout, and more.
Drift is more suitable for fairly large businesses, and the pricing reflects that. If you’re just starting to make money online, we recommend that you try one of the other tools on our list.
Pricing: Drift costs from $400/month billed annually. This includes 5 users. (There is a free plan available too, but that doesn’t have the chatbot features.)
Chatfuel is a powerful chatbot platform for Messenger, Facebook, and Instagram. You don’t need any coding knowledge or previous experience to use it.
Lots of different companies use Chatfuel, including large brands like Adidas, T-Mobile, LEGO, TechCrunch, and more.
You can use your bot to increase sales, to qualify leads, or to provide answers to frequently asked questions. This lets you save a lot of time for your customer service team.
There is plenty of documentation on the Chatfuel website to help you build a bot easily. This includes advice on how to make sure you follow Facebook’s rules for using a Messenger bot.
Pricing: Chatfuel costs from $15/month, with no user limit. There’s also a free plan that offers a fully-featured bot and up to 50 users.
MobileMonkey lets you create bots using their OmniChat™ technology. These bots work in web chat, in Messenger, and even through SMS text messages.
This saves you time and money creating different bots using different tools. You can create a single bot and use it across multiple platforms.
Your customer service team can easily respond to messages. MobileMonkey has desktop and mobile apps that give you a single inbox to easily monitor and respond to messages from different channels.
It also offers integrations with third-party software that you may already be using such as CRM software, email marketing service, webinar provider, and more.
Pricing: MobileMonkey costs from $14.25/month, billed annually, for an unlimited number of leads. There’s also a free version with unlimited leads but fewer features.
Tars is a tool that lets you create conversational landing pages. Essentially, this means replacing a traditional landing page with a chatbot.
It lets you easily qualify leads. Tars is particularly well optimized for mobile users, providing a natural and easy chatbot conversation.
Making a chatbot is quite straight forward using Tars. You can either create a conversation workflow from scratch, or you can use a pre-built template.
Pricing: Tars costs from $83.25/month, billed annually. There’s no free plan, but you can take a free 14-day trial (no credit card required).
Tidio is a live chat platform powered by chatbots. It allows you to communicate your clients by using web and mobile friendly chatbot, Facebook Messenger chatbot, and more.
It comes with an easy dashboard and a mobile app to answer all user inquires at any time from anywhere. You can also use automation as much as you like to answer customer questions and design funnels that lead to conversions.
You can use a chatbot template or create your own chatbot scenarios based on keywords and customer behavior on your site. It is easy to use and integrate with your eCommerce platform, email marketing, and help desk software.
Pricing: Starting from $18 per month. They have a free plan too but it does not include chatbots.
Zendesk Chat is part of Zendesk, a popular customer support platform for businesses. It has features that let you handle support tickets, chat live with your customers, and more.
You can use automated messages within Zendesk Chat, such as triggering messages based on what your customers are doing. You can also optimize your messages by testing which ones have a high engagement rate.
You can even integrate it with other chatbot tools if you want more advanced chatbot features.
Pricing: Zendesk Chat costs from $14 per agent per month, when billed annually. You can take a 14 day free trial (no credit card details needed). There’s also a free Lite version, which only lets you have 1 agent and 1 chat at a time.
Quriobot is a simple chatbot that has a free plan, making it a good option for small companies on a tight budget.
Like other chatbot software, it has a simple drag and drop interface. You can either build conversations from scratch or use one of the available templates. You can also create several bots at once.
You can adjust Quriobot’s styling to fit your website’s color scheme and you can even add custom CSS if you want to.
Quriobot integrates with help desk software such as LiveAgent, if you want a complete solution that gives you a support desk, live chat, and more.
Pricing: Quriobot has a generous free plan that allows you up to 500 chats per month, with unlimited bots and organization members. If you want more chats per month, or if you want to remove the Quriobot branding, you need to pay from €9/month. (Quriobot’s pricing is in Euros.)
Intercom is a flexible tool that can be used as a chatbot or for live chat with an agent. You can use it to automate your marketing and to engage users.
Intercom’s whole approach is designed to be conversational, to help you build relationships. It’s easy to scale as your business grows, too.
With Intercom, you can personalize your chatbot’s interactions with customers. You can filter and target customers based on what they do (or don’t do) and you can group them into segments based on their attributes and behavior.
Intercom integrates with email marketing services, Slack, Google Analytics, CRM software, and more.
Pricing: Intercom’s Start package costs from $39/month. However, to use the chatbot features, you need at least the Growth plan from $99/month. You can take a free 14 day trial of either of these plans (credit card details are required).
SnapEngage is designed to help you with both sales and support. You can use it on your WordPress site. It also integrates with Facebook Messenger, and other popular software.
It comes with ready-to-use bots, such as the Info-Capture and the Answer Bot. You can also create custom bots using the custom bot API.
If you run a healthcare site, then SnapEngage offers ‘Health Engage’ to provide secure, HIPAA-compliant chatbots, live chat, and SMS messaging.
Pricing: SnapEngage costs from $16 per user per month (with a minimum of 3 users), billed annually. Their HealthEngage option costs from $26 per user per month, again with a minimum of 3 users.
LivePerson offers live chat software, as you might expect from their name. You can also use it to create automated conversation flows using a chatbot.
Your chatbots can connect potential buyers to a live agent, send offers based on the customer’s interests, and even schedule appointments or meetings. Customers can also check on their order status, find out their account balance, and get answers to billing or payment questions.
As well as integrating with your WordPress site, LivePerson can be used on Facebook, Twitter, and more.
Pricing: LivePerson doesn’t provide a standard scale of prices. Instead, you need to contact them for a quote.
Ada is a chatbot that can tailor its responses and recommendations based on the customer’s information, intent, and interests. It’s designed to be simple to use, so that your support team can set everything up. There’s no coding involved.
You can also integrate Ada with your live chat so that customers can move seamlessly from the chatbot to a live agent. It also integrates with your team calendar to schedule appointments and bookings.
Pricing: Ada doesn’t provide prices upfront. Instead, you need to chat with the sales team or request a demo to find out how much it will cost you.
Our Pick: Best Chatbot Software
For most businesses, we recommend ChatBot.com as the best AI chatbot software because it’s easy to use and comes with pre-made workflows.
They also offer many built-in integrations with third-party marketing services, and the pricing is fairly affordable compared to other solutions.
If you’re looking for alternatives, then please take a look at FreshChat or Drift.
We hope this article helped you learn about the best AI chatbots software for your WordPress site. You might also want to take a look at our guides to the best live chat software and best business phone services for small businesses.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
In recent years we are seeing a great boom in artificial intelligence. Due to the boom in deep learning, we now have more robust and more general predictive models, being able to face problems that were previously unthinkable.
Self-driving cars, virtual assistants, or new text translators are just some of the examples of the applications that artificial intelligence has today. However, artificial intelligence can be applied to solve practically any problem that arises.
Contact someone at your company through live chat.
Talk to a chatbot (automated chat).
Call your sales team, or book a call with them.
Lead generation is essential for all online businesses. Of course, it’s also important to have a strong process for converting the leads into customers. However, most businesses struggle to get enough leads in the first place.
Even if you run a nonprofit, lead generation matters. It can help you get more donations and more support.
Our goal with this list is to share the absolute best WordPress lead generation plugins that you can use to grow your business faster.
Unlike other best lead generation tool lists, we are not just sharing a list of plugins that do the same thing. Instead, we’re focusing on lead generation from a holistic point of view.
For each lead generation solution category, we share an expert pick along with one alternative option for that category. This will help us keep this list comprehensive without causing choice paralysis.
With that said, here are the best lead generation plugins for WordPress.
WPForms is the best contact form plugin on the market. Over 6 million website owners use the beginner-friendly, drag-and-drop builder to create any kind of online form for their WordPress sites.
It comes with over a hundred pre-built form templates you can use as a starting point. After that, you can customize the form to match your needs using the drag-and-drop form builder interface.
Here are just some of the lead generation forms you can create:
Each time someone submits the form, you will automatically get an email notification. You can easily turn this off if you prefer not to receive email alerts. WPForms will store each completed form entry in your WordPress database too.
It’s also possible to send notifications to multiple recipients using WPForms. For example, you might want to send a customer inquiry notification to a specific person in the sales team and their supervisor.
Price:
WPForms pricing starts at $49.50/year. There’s also a free version of the plugin, which has limited features.
Alternative:
Formidable Forms ($39.50 per year) is a good alternative to WPForms. It has powerful tools that let you create different forms, including lead generation calculators. However, it’s not as beginner friendly as WPForms.
OptinMonster is a powerful lead generation and popup plugin that you can use on your WordPress site.
It lets you create high-converting popups and email signup forms that help you turn abandoned website visitors into subscribers and customers.
It has lots of useful features, including Exit Intent® technology. This lets you show your popup at the exact moment when someone is about to leave your site.
You can combine it with their page targeting feature to show customized popup messages for each page on your site, which is proven to increase conversions.
With OptinMonster, you even get special popups like spin the wheel popups and Yes/No optins. These can boost your conversion rate even further.
There are lots of different professionally designed templates included in the app. This makes it quick and easy to create your lead forms using the drag-and-drop builder.
You can also use OptinMonster to generate leads in other ways. For instance, you might use the content-locking feature to ask visitors to join your email list before they can read your full content.
You don’t necessarily need to use it to generate email leads, either. You could add a click-to-call button to your popup, use it to show special discount codes, and more.
Price:
OptinMonster starts at $9/month when billed annually. To get advanced features like Exit Intent technology and Yes/No forms, you need the Pro plan from $29/month.
Alternative:
Thrive Leads ($99 per year) is a good alternative to OptinMonster. It offers a range of different types of lead generation forms and popups. It also has a built-in template library to speed up the building process.
SeedProd is the best WordPress website and theme builder on the market. It’s used by over a million website owners to easily create any type of website without writing any code.
It has dozens of professional templates you can customize easily with the drag and drop builder.
SeedProd also provides you with a beginner-friendly landing page builder. And you will find a ready-made sales page, opt-in page, webinar registration, coming soon page templates, and more.
All of these landing page templates can be completely customized to help you start generating leads as quickly and easily as possible.
It includes dozens of blocks designed to help you build better landing pages, like testimonial blocks, countdown timers, CTA buttons, pricing tables, and so much more.
You will find a searchable stock photo library with over 2 million photos that you can add to your pages to improve conversions.
It also has powerful integrations with the top email marketing software and thousands of third-party apps via Zapier. This lets you easily send your leads to your lead management tool of choice.
For online store owners, you can use the WooCommerce blocks to build custom WooCommerce product pages easily, thank you pages, and more to collect leads and sell more products.
Price:
SeedProd starts from $39.50 per year (only $3.29 per month). Plus, there’s a free version you can try to see how the plugin works.
Alternative:
Instapage offers similar page builder features but is more expensive and starts at $199 per month (billed annually).
LiveChat is the best live chat software for WordPress websites. It’s very easy to set up, and you can integrate it with dozens of other marketing services.
By adding live chat support to your WordPress website, you can build a better relationship with your users and convert more visitors into customers.
This plugin places a chat button in the bottom right-hand corner of your website. Visitors can click on this to chat with your team in real time.
Plus, your support team members don’t need to log in to WordPress to use LiveChat. Instead, they can use the LiveChat app on their laptop or mobile devices.
LiveChat will create a support ticket if a visitor contacts your team outside of support hours.
LiveChat is fast and easy to use for your visitors and your support team. It lets you quickly turn leads into customers by answering pre-sales questions straight away.
Price:
LiveChat starts at $20 per month when billed annually with a 14-day free trial. Our LiveChat coupon gives you an extended 30-day free trial plus a 30% discount.
Alternative:
Brevo (Previously Sendinblue) offers a simple, free live chat feature that you can use on your website. It also offers email, SMS, and a CRM tool that integrate with live chat.
ChatBot is one of the best AI chatbot software options on the market and lets you use automated live chat to connect with your potential customers and respond to questions 24/7.
To help you get started quickly, ChatBot has lots of pre-designed templates. For instance, you can use the lead generation bot to book calls. Meanwhile, the sales bot template allows you to sell products directly from the chat window.
ChatBot can be used in Facebook Messenger as well as on your website. That makes it a great option for companies and organizations that get a lot of inquiries through Facebook.
It’s easy to integrate it with other apps, such as LiveChat. A live agent can step into the conversation seamlessly if needed.
Price:
ChatBot pricing starts at $52 per month. There’s a 14-day free trial available.
Alternative:
Hubspot offers a suite of business CRM tools, including a chatbot builder and live chat. You can get started free, and paid plans start at $30 per month.
RafflePress is one of the best WordPress giveaway plugins on the market. It allows you to easily create viral giveaways and contests that you can use to grow your website traffic and email list.
You can use the drag and drop builder to quickly create giveaway campaigns in minutes without writing any code. Plus, there’s a built-in template library to help make giveaway creation even faster.
A unique refer-a-friend feature lets you do word-of-mouth marketing by letting users share your contest on their social media profiles.
This helps to build engagement and can get you a lot of new visitors to your WordPress blog.
You will find many other powerful features that help improve your campaigns, like email verification, fraud protection, social logins, giveaway landing pages, success tracking, and more.
Plus, your giveaways will run on mobile devices, so you can reach your visitors no matter where they happen to be.
RafflePress has a free version of the plugin you can use to get started. Paid plans start at $39.50 per year for the starter plan.
Alternative:
Gleam is an advanced giveaway platform you can use to run contests and giveaways. However, it’s not as beginner friendly, and you will need at least the $97 per month Pro plan to unlock useful features.
It lets you easily send targeted push messages to visitors after they leave your website.
We use push notifications here at WPBeginner, and they are consistently a top 5 source of our traffic. They are a highly-effective way to convert website visitors into loyal followers and customers.
Visitors simply give their permission to receive push notifications by clicking a button:
You can set up push notifications to automatically send out to your subscribers whenever you publish a blog post or use them to send completely custom messages.
It’s a very easy-to-use solution for beginners to advanced users. You will find powerful features like A/B testing, custom-triggered campaigns, interactive messages, custom drip campaigns, and so much more.
Plus, you can use the marketing automation features to create abandoned card sequences, scheduled messages, and more.
You will be able to see a detailed breakdown of your subscriber engagement and even the transactional revenue generated from your push campaigns.
Price:
PushEngage starts at $9 per month and gives you support for 100,000 subscribers and unlimited campaigns. There’s also a free plan available that gives you 30 campaigns per month for 200 subscribers.
Alternative:
OneSignal has a free plan for unlimited notifications on mobile. For advanced features like delayed notifications, pricing starts at $99 per month.
FunnelKit, formerly known as WooFunnels, is the best sales funnel builder for WordPress.
You can use it to create lead-generation funnels, sales funnels, high-converting checkout pages, one-click upsells, and more.
It’s essentially a ClickFunnels alternative that helps you convert website visitors into leads and customers.
FunnelKit comes with a built-in library of beautiful funnel templates that you can import in one click.
You can easily customize the templates using the WordPress block editor as well as popular page builder plugins like Elementor, Divi, and others.
FunnelKit offers in-depth analytics so that you can see how your funnels are performing in real time. Plus, it comes with A/B testing that lets you experiment with different versions of your funnels to find out which one converts best.
In addition, FunnelKit has a marketing automation solution called FunnelKit Automations. It allows you to set up automated email and SMS campaigns for lead nurturing, welcome series, abandoned cart recovery, post-purchase upsell, and more.
Price:
FunnelKit starts at $99.50 per year. To access FunnelKit Automations, you need at least the Professional plan, which costs $249.50 per year.
Alternative:
SeedProd, which we mentioned earlier in this list, can also be used to easily create lead generation pages, sales pages, custom WooCommerce checkout pages, and more.
WP Call Button allows you to easily add a ‘click to call’ button on your WordPress website or WooCommerce store. Visitors can simply click or tap the button to call you straight away.
If your customers need to call you before purchasing a service or booking an appointment, adding a click-to-call button on your website will increase your leads and sales.
WP Call Button makes adding your button to any post or page easy. You can include it in your WordPress sidebar, too. It’s also easy to create a sticky floating call button that stays visible all the time.
By creating an affiliate program, you can have your own team of affiliates promoting your products in exchange for a commission.
This can help you get more visibility online, traffic, and of course, make more sales. You can even create your very own WooCommerce affiliate program using this plugin.
It comes with everything you need to manage your program, including accurate affiliate tracking, integrated payouts, real-time reporting, affiliate coupon tracking, and so much more.
With manual affiliate approval and top-performing affiliate data, you can build lasting partnerships with your most valuable affiliates for years to come.
Price:
AffiliateWP starts at $149.50 per year and has everything you need to run a successful affiliate program.
Alternative:
Easy Affiliate is another popular WordPress plugin for creating and managing an affiliate program. The basic plan starts at $99.50 per year.
All in One SEO is the best WordPress SEO plugin used by over 3 million websites. It’s the most comprehensive SEO toolkit that makes it easy to improve your SEO rankings without learning any complicated SEO jargon.
Doing WordPress SEO is an important part of lead generation. You need to bring people to your website before they can join your email list, call you, subscribe to push notifications, or do anything else on this list.
Once you install and activate the plugin, an easy-to-use setup wizard will help you choose the best SEO settings for your business, so you can start getting more traffic.
It has a TruSEO score, which offers detailed on-page SEO analysis and gives you an actionable SEO checklist to help you easily optimize your posts and pages.
All in One SEO can help you improve your post SEO titles and meta descriptions, generate rich snippet schema markup and create smart XML sitemaps and RSS sitemaps.
Plus, there are built-in WooCommerce SEO settings, like individual product optimizations, product image SEO, and more, to help your online store get more visitors from the search results.
Price:
AIOSEO starts at $49.60 per year for access to advanced SEO features. You can also try out the free version to begin optimizing your site for SEO.
Alternative:
Yoast SEO is another popular SEO plugin for WordPress that will help you optimize your site. There is a free version and a premium version that starts at $99 per year.
This means you can easily find out what’s working and what’s not, focusing on the areas that really matter.
For instance, you might use MonsterInsights to enable author tracking and see which writers for your site are producing the best-performing posts.
Or you could use MonsterInsights to track link clicks and button clicks. This lets you figure out which links and buttons are getting clicked and which ones aren’t, letting you pinpoint areas for improvement.
MonsterInsights is quick and easy to set up and gives you real-time stats. It can even track things like your eCommerce data, form completions, and file downloads. This gives you more insights into your lead generation efforts.
Price:
MonsterInsights starts at $99.50/year. There’s also a free version available for WordPress with limited features.
Alternative:
ExactMetrics offers similar features to MonsterInsights and starts at $99.50 per year.
If your business relies on phone calls for lead generation, then Nextiva can help you improve your business communication across the board.
It has a web-based admin panel that will let you manage your entire unified communications platform in one place.
You will find business phone features like call routing, voicemail to text and email, SMS messaging, unlimited domestic calling, online faxing, and so much more.
Every new account can get a free local or toll-free number. Plus, you get all standard features like caller ID, call forwarding, routing, custom greetings, and more.
You can even integrate your business phone with powerful features like live chat and CRM services.
We use Nextiva at WPBeginner for our business phone service. It works well for our remote team since they can receive business calls on their cell phones while still keeping their numbers private.
Price:
Nextiva starts at $14.95 per month per user for all your business phone needs. The Enterprise plan costs $26.95 per month per user and includes video conferencing, call recording, and more.
Alternative:
RingCentral is another popular business phone provider that’s packed with features. Paid plans start at $20 per month per user.
What Is the Best Lead Generation Plugin for WordPress?
We believe you need multiple plugins for a robust lead-generation strategy on your site.
With that said, WPForms is the best lead generation plugin for WordPress. You can use their drag-and-drop form builder to create any online form.
If you are looking for a live chat solution to improve leads and support, then LiveChat and ChatBot are both great options.
If you want to improve your overall conversion rate on your website, then nothing beats the powerful features that OptinMonster has to offer.
If you want to improve your existing website and product pages to generate more leads and make more sales, then SeedProd is a must-have plugin.
With any lead generation strategy, attracting leads is only the first part. You have to ensure a proper sales process to close the deal.
If you rely on phone calls, then we recommend using Nextiva. It comes with auto-attendant, call-routing, CRM, and powerful sales features that you can use to increase your sales.
Virtual assistants and chatbots are great tools for improving customer service in any company. However, to be able to become a great customer service agent there is some work to do to make it fit your business needs.
Businesses today have their own way of naming things and the same way you would need to train any co-worker on the business vocabulary, you need to train the virtual assistant. That is when customization starts.
Besides the natural language inputs of the user, client applications can also include input parameters in their requests to Teneo. The values of these input parameters can then be stored in for example global variables, so that they can be used by flows, integrations, etc.
Technology has revolutionized the education sector, especially in the current pandemic scenario, wherein remote communication and collaboration software emerged as the key enabler for learning.
However, even before the coronavirus shifted the whole gamut of student-teacher interactions online, students were using artificial intelligence (AI) based tools like the Grammarly platform or the Hemingway Editor to improve their writing and eliminate plagiarized text. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Today, AI is finding its way into the core of the education system through apps and software aimed at personalized learning, impartial grading systems, and more.
If you want your chatbot to be able to know the answer to more than just the things you teach it about your business you can integrate to other services. Why invent the wheel twice? With integrations, you can have loads of information that might change from day to day without having to constantly update your solution manually.
Let’s look into how you add an integration in Teneo Studio.
Traditionally, development teams built applications in one large codebase. This technique suited the way teams worked and what their users needed, but the modern user demands reliable, fast responses and near-constant updates to applications. The developers behind these applications want to try new techniques, tools, and languages to see if they improve a user's experience. Meeting these needs is difficult when an entire application is inside one large, tightly coupled codebase, often referred to as a "monolithic" application. As a result, microservices — breaking individual application components into smaller, self-contained "micro" services — has emerged as an alternative to this monolithic architecture. These microservices generally communicate with each other via standard APIs and run in containers that package applications and their dependencies into recreatable and scalable self-contained units.
One major benefit to microservices is that if your service experiences increased demand, you can add more instances to cope. You can then reduce them again when no longer needed, keeping your infrastructure needs and costs as efficient as necessary. This ability to add instances of a service with ease also means that you can upgrade or update services in a microservices architecture without any downtime for your entire application. Of course, microservices bring their own challenges as well. For a more in-depth exploration of the advantages and challenges with microservices, read this article.
Scripts in Teneo are written in Groovy or Java code. Apache Groovy is similar to Java but with an easier to learn syntax. More details on Groovy can be found here: http://groovy-lang.org. An overview of the differences between Groovy and Java can be found here: Differences with Java.
Sometimes you may want to add a class to your solution, which you can then call in your integrations or scripts.
Language objects are building blocks for language conditions. Sometimes you may not find the language objects you need in the Teneo Lexical Resources (TLR), for the simple reason that they do not exist. Teneo Lexical Resources have primarily been designed to cover general language expressions and common phrases, so whenever you want to use more (domain) specific words in your dialog, you may not find existing language objects for them.
The good news is that you can easily create missing language objects yourself. Once created, you can use them in your current solution. In fact, you can re-use them in other solutions as well!
A chatbot is an artificial intelligence or a computer program that conducts a conversation through textual or auditory methods. This kind of program is frequently designed to persuasively pretend how a person would behave like a conversational partner, thus passing the Turing test. They are normally utilized in dialog systems for different practical objectives like information acquisition or customer service.
When you created your first solution you chose English as the bot’s language and the tutorials on this site assume your bot understands English. However, Teneo supports many more languages, which you can read about here: Languages.
The evaluation environment that is created for you when you sign up contains the resources needed that offer advanced support for Dutch, English, French, German, Norwegian and Swedish. On this page we will show you how you can create a German solution, but the same principle applies to French as well.
Sometimes we want our bot to give some extra information that the user did not explicitly request, such as special deals, promotions, and more. In Teneo, this can be achieved using prompt triggers.
Prompt triggers are tested after the normal flow execution, right before the response is given. If a prompt trigger matches, the flow containing this trigger will be executed and the resulting output will be added to the response. In the example below, the first part of the bot answer comes from the ‘User wants to order coffee’ flow, while the second, highlighted, part comes from a flow that has a prompt trigger:
Sometimes you want a variety of answers that the bot you build choose from. And to make sure that the bot remembers what has been said during the conversation a script is a way to accomplish this.
Scripts can be included in flows. Let’s create a very basic flow that contains a script.
