How to Create an AI Chatbot: 5-Step Guide

What is an AI chatbot?

In today's digital landscape, knowing how to create an AI chatbot is becoming increasingly essential for businesses and individuals looking to build chatbots that enhance customer experience. These intelligent software agents simulate human conversation through text or voice interactions, providing users instant responses and assistance. 

AI chatbots have revolutionized how we interact with technology, from answering customer queries and facilitating online transactions to enhancing user engagement and streamlining internal processes. Check out these use cases for more ideas.

As we move through 2024, the role of AI chatbots has never been more critical. They help businesses provide personalized and efficient customer service, making them indispensable assets.

Few reasons to implement an AI chatbot

• Provide a 24/7 assistance to visitors coming to your website

• Instant respond to user queries in seconds

• Lower operational costs by handling multiple inquiries simultaneously 

• Delivers consistent and accurate information, minimizing errors

• Frees up human staff to focus on more complex or high-value tasks

• Collects valuable data on user interactions and preferences

• Offers a personalized and engaging experience with tailored responses

Ready to learn how to create an AI chatbot? 

In this article, we’ll explore the steps for creating an AI chatbot for your business:

• Step 1: Sign up for a chatbot builder

• Step 2: Build a knowledge base

• Step 3: Build the chatbot flow

• Step 4: Plan for fallbacks

• Step 5: Deploy your AI chatbot

How to create an AI chatbot in 5 simple steps

Creating an AI chatbot can seem like a daunting task, but by following these five simple steps, you can build chatbots that are powerful and effective for your business.

These steps will guide you through choosing the right chatbot builder and designing a conversational flow.

Step 1: Sign up for a chatbot builder

There are many chatbot builders out there, but it’s essential to choose a no-code chatbot builder, which makes it easy for a non-technical person to build a chatbot for your business. 

To help you choose the right chatbot builder for your business, here are 11 things you should look out for.

For this example, we will sign up for WotNot, a free and easy no-code chatbot builder.

You can explore more chatbot builders on this list.

Step 2: Build a knowledge base

The first step in learning how to create an AI chatbot is building a knowledge base. This is the repository of information from which the AI chatbot will draw answers.

Just like humans can answer questions we learn from school, books, etc., AI can answer questions based on what you train it with.

In WotNot, we offer a simple and easy way to train your knowledge base with data sources. 

You can choose to train your knowledge base by:

• Selecting a public domain or its URLs

• Entering text directly

• Uploading files

For this example, let’s assume we are creating an AI chatbot for WotNot’s website to answer basic sales questions about the product. 

So, we will train the knowledge base with the website www.wotnot.io and all its URL(s).

Remember, when you select URL(s) as your data source, defining a refresh frequency is essential. This will allow the bot to automatically scan your domain again daily/weekly/monthly to train the knowledge base with new URL(s) or updates in the content.

Step 3: Build the chatbot flow

With your knowledge base ready, the next step in how to create an AI chatbot is designing the chatbot flow.

First, let’s greet the visitor with a welcome message to showcase a warm and friendly gesture.

Second, let’s ask the visitor what they need assistance with and expect a question to be received. Also, we will connect the knowledge base from which the AI will generate an answer.

WotNot utilizes OpenAI’s GPT models to generate an answer; this answer will strictly be generated only from the data in your knowledge base. 

To customize the response you get from the AI model, you can write your own prompts. A prompt is nothing but a set of instructions to help the AI generate a response.

Prompts generally contain:

• Tone of the answer

• Formatting of the answer

• Guidelines on what to include/exclude

• Expected type of response

Let’s use a simple prompt in this example:

I want you to act as a support agent. Your name is "AI Assistant". You will provide me with answers from the given info. If the answer is not included, say exactly "Hmm, I am not sure." and stop after that. Refuse to answer any question not about the info. 

You can explore more prompts from this library.

Step 4: Plan for fallbacks

No AI chatbot is perfect in generating the right answer, so planning for fallback options is crucial.

After the AI chatbot generates a response, let’s double-check with the visitor to see if the chatbot answered their question correctly by asking, “Did this answer your question?”

If the answer is unsatisfactory, collect the visitor’s contact information and forward it to your sales or support team for follow-up.

Step 5: Deploy your AI chatbot

Now that your AI chatbot is ready, customize its appearance to match your brand. Change the icon, name, and colors to ensure it aligns with your website’s theme.

Lastly, to implement the chatbot on your website, copy and paste this lightweight Javascript code on your HTML's <body> section. If you use Google Tag Manager, just create and publish a new tag.

Congratulations! You’ve successfully created and deployed an AI chatbot on your website in just a few minutes using WotNot.

All it took was a few minutes and an easy AI chatbot builder like WotNot.

By following these steps, you’ll master how to create an AI chatbot that enhances your business operations and customer interactions.

Bonus step: Improve bot responses

Since AI chatbots may not always be perfect, WotNot provides a simple way to improve their accuracy. Use the “Custom Answers” feature to review and modify responses.

Access the log of questions and answers, and for any incorrect responses, click “Modify Answer” to update it with the correct information. Save your changes, and your chatbot will provide improved answers going forward.

It's that simple! From now on, anyone asking the same question will get your modified answer rather than the AI model-generated one.