The quick development and adoption of technology has introduced us to chatbots. Chatbots from sites like Convertobot now play a vital role in our daily lives.

Almost every website now uses a chatbot. Customers, especially millennials, are tech savvy and have made businesses make great use of this tool.

Chatbots have many interesting uses. Some of them include coming up with results to queries and adapting their behavior to experience due to their self-learning ability.

Before you make the decision to develop a chatbot for your business, you need to diligently scrutinize your business to find out which chatbot will best suit your business needs.

You will have to establish your business type. You will also need to outline your business goals.

Establishing your target audience is also crucial. It will help you estimate the amount of volume you expect your chatbot to have.

The number of messaging platforms you will target with the chatbot is also important to establish. The amount you can spare for the chatbot will also be paramount. Another thing you will have to establish is how you will market the chatbot to your target audience.

After you have clearly defined the above parameters you can proceed to develop your chatbot. The time needed to build your chatbot arises at this point.

A chatbot can take anywhere from a few hours to several weeks to develop depending on its complexity. The size of your business will also determine the type of chatbot to develop. Smaller firms cannot afford to invest too much time or money into a chatbot regardless of its benefits.

You have three major options as it pertains to chatbot development:

A Ready-Made Chatbot

There exists a marketplace for bots where you can purchase a chatbot that suits your needs. You can search a catalog of bots to find the one that best suits your business.

With ready madechatbots, you can find bots that can perform multiple functions and run on multiple messaging platforms. The downside to purchasing a ready-made chatbot is that you can customize them.

On the other hand, they take no time to develop. You get them as soon as you buy them.

Use a Bot Developer Platform

You can use a self-service platform to build your own chatbot. Some platforms may require some technical expertise to use but most require none at all.

For those that require no coding skills, you will be directed with a series of tutorials. You will set up Artificial Intelligence algorithms and integrate your bot with other platforms such as messaging platforms.

Such bots can be created in several hours or several days depending on its complexity. All you need is an idea or beginning point.

Build a Bot from Nothing

If you have an in house IIT specialist, have great programming skills or can outsource the work to a chatbot agency, you can build a chatbot from scratch. Even by doing so, the bot development ties will vary.

If you integrate your bot with one chat it will take 40 – 56 hours. You may also decide to create a communication interface. A command language interface will take 40-56 hours while a natural language interface will take 120-160 hours.

You may also implement business logic into your chatbot if you want it to if you want to integrate applications. It may take up to 192 hours to build such a bot.

As can be seen, the chatbot’s type and complexity will determine its development.

Francisco Butler