Top 5 Chatbot Platforms – Comparing the Industry’s Best AI Chatbots

Artificial Intelligent Chatbot platforms are one of the best ways companies can save money on customer service, sales, and marketing today.

In fact, the argument for AI chatbots is so strong that 80% of businesses want to implement a chatbot by 2020.

But, deploying an AI chatbot is not as easy as just buying one off of the shelf. These are customized solutions that respond to user inquiries in a human-like way.

They have to know all of the important information about your company that a potential customer is likely to ask. They should have answers ready for a broad range of uncommon inquiries. They have to have access to your database and be able to reliably and securely access it to derive insight.

However, not all AI chatbots are equal in this regard, and your existing data infrastructure will make certain options more attractive than others.

As it stands now, there are more than 60 AI chatbot companies on the market. Each one offers its own unique take on the value proposition these powerful solutions offer.

Comparing the 5 Best AI Chatbots

Our list of the top 5 leading chatbots consists of AI applications from IBM, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook. It’s likely that you’ll find a reliable chatbot partner in one of these brands.

Below, we’ll go over all of the best AI chatbots, as well as their pros and cons so you can consider which one would be the best fit for your company:

IBM Watson

IBM Watson is built on a neural network containing one billion Wikipedia words, capable of understanding speech, images, and text. It comes at a premium price but does an excellent job in healthcare, finance, legal, and retail environments – making it one of the best AI chatbots on the market.

Watson offers users three licensing options: Free, Standard, and Premium. With software development kits (SDKs) available for Python, Java, iOS, Unity, and Node, it is widely compatible with popular programming languages, making it a powerful chatbot tool for a variety of purposes.

Watson’s main strength is parsing complex requests without being restricted to a specific domain or subject. This is why one reason why its famous 2011 Jeopardy appearance was such a success. App Maisters can help you develop intuitive, value-generating chatbot solutions for the IBM Watson Conversation Service.

Google Dialogflow

Google may be lagging behind the Amazon Echo in its home conversational device sales, but its chatbot AI interface is the smartest of the bunch. It gives a key advantage in parsing unexpected requests in a human-like way, as shown by Google’s now-famous show-stopping Duplex presentation from earlier this year.

Google’s chatbot platform, called Dialogflow, allows users to create solutions for a multitude of chat-based platforms and messenger apps. It allows developers to iterate quickly and make immediate modifications so that chat quality constantly improves.

Google’s interface is easy to manage without specialized expertise in the field of artificial intelligence.

This can be a key value for companies that need to appoint responsible employees to chatbot management without necessarily onboarding new AI experts for routine maintenance.

Amazon Lex

Amazon Lex is one of the easiest tools to use on this list, and it offers native compatibility with the Alexa platform. This could be a deal-breaker for some users, but Amazon’s vested dominance of the retail market is sure to attract the majority of its users to Lex.

Amazon Lex runs entirely on Amazon’s infrastructure and uses serverless computing processes made possible by AWS Lambda. The practical benefit here is being able to scale your chatbot service while spending almost zero time or resources on administration. There are no upfront fees or minimum commitments – you pay exactly for what you use.

This makes Amazon Lex a great choice for small businesses with an eye on fast growth. Amazon offers a free tier, so you can get started with its easy interface with no initial investment and then scale upwards as it begins to generate value. App Maisters can help you develop your chatbot deployment to a full-scale professional solution using this platform.

Microsoft LUIS

Microsoft’s Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS) runs off of multiple software developer kits, including C# and Python. LUIS applications are centered around a specific domain, allowing the chatbot to deeply engage users on a narrow range of subjects.

One of the main benefits of choosing LUIS is its active learning technology. It uses pre-existing, world-class models already present in Microsoft’s Bing and Cortana platforms. Users can deploy these models to an HTTP endpoint with a single click thanks to LUIS’s use of JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). Python, Node JS, Android, and C# SDKs ensure that development is accessible.

LUIS does not perform semantic analysis, which can make it difficult to parse open-ended queries the way Watson does, but it does feature industry-leading voice capabilities.

Facebook Wit

Facebook acquired Wit.ai in 2015, paving the way to its current status as a natural-language processing powerhouse. It supports the most languages on this list – about 50, from Albanian to Vietnamese – and it’s free for developers to use.

Wit.ai programmers can develop Entities, Intents, Actions, and (importantly) Contexts. Contexts improve the usability of the Wit.ai platform, which does establish a steeper learning curve for users. But this AI can learn new commands using semantic analysis, establishing better performance and understanding over time.

While this platform offers great results, it is not as user-friendly as some of the others on this list. Without a visual development environment or top-notch support, you need to rely on experienced developers to build and operate sophisticated chatbots.

Rely on Our Development Expertise to Build Your Chatbot

With time and patience, you can build your own chatbot on one of the simpler chatbot platforms available today. But that doesn’t mean it’s the best idea. State-of-the-art features and industry-leading scalability are only available through the best AI chatbot platforms.

Chatbots are no longer a novelty. Rely on an expert development team to create one that comprehensively answers your users’ questions with precision and authenticity.

Ready to start your chatbot project? Find out which one is the right choice for your business by talking to a member of our development team today.