Chatbots, better referred to as conversation software, are amazing tools for a lot of businesses. They help businesses serve their client's server 24/7 without increasing effort, with consistent quality, and the built-in option to defer to a human when bots are not enough.

They are a great example of where technology and AI has come together to improve the impact of human effort.

They range from voice-based solutions such as Alexa, to text-based Intercom chat boxes, to menu-based navigation in Uber.

A common misconception is that building chatbots needs large teams and a lot of machine learning expertise, though this is true if you are trying to build a generic chatbot platform like Microsoft or Facebook (or even Luis, Wit.ai, and so on).

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Why build a chatbot?
• Figuring out the right user intent
• Bot responses