How to Create AI Chatbot: 5-Step Guide

Understanding how to create an AI chatbot or conversational bot is becoming increasingly vital for businesses and individuals seeking to develop solutions 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. But what exactly is an AI chatbot?

Let's dive into the basics.

What is an AI chatbot?

An AI chatbot is like having a smart, virtual assistant that can chat with your customers just like a real person would. It’s powered by artificial intelligence, which means it understands what people are asking and can respond instantly, making conversations feel natural.

When you create an AI chatbot, you’re giving your business the ability to offer quick support, answer questions, and even guide users through different processes—all without needing a human to be available 24/7. AI chatbots help you stay connected with your customers, providing the kind of service that keeps them coming back, all while making your operations more efficient.

With all these capabilities, it’s easy to see why AI chatbots are becoming an essential tool for businesses today. But what are the specific advantages of creating an AI chatbot for your business?

Let’s explore a few key reasons.

Few reasons to create an AI chatbot

Think about the impact you can make when you create an AI chatbot for your business. It’s like having a virtual assistant that’s always available to provide quick, accurate support to your customers, no matter the time. Not only does it offer instant help, but it also eases the workload on your team by handling multiple conversations at once. Plus, AI chatbot will help you lower operational costs while delivering a seamless and reliable customer experience.

Moreover, by integrating an AI bot, businesses can free up human staff to focus on complex tasks, collect valuable user data, and offer a personalized experience that keeps customers engaged.

Here are few reasons to consider creating 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 your own ai chatbot? Keep reading to find out!

5 steps to create AI chatbot

Creating AI chatbots can seem like a daunting task, but by following these five simple steps, you can build AI chatbots that are powerful and effective for your business. Beginners can easily design their first chatbot using the provided steps.

These steps will guide you through choosing the right chatbot builder and chatbot creation process.

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 AI chatbot for your business without requiring any coding skills.

Here are 11 things you should look out for when choosing a chatbot builder for your business.

For now, we will sign up for WotNot, a free and easy no-code chatbot builder to create AI chatbot.

You can explore more chatbot builders on this list.

Step 2: Build a knowledge base

The first step in creating an AI chatbot is building a knowledge base (KB). This is the repository of information from which the chatbot is answering questions.

Similar to how humans can answer questions we learn from school, books, etc., AI chatbots can answer questions based on what you train it with. Knowledge bases are essential for large language models (LLMs) to generate a response.

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

You can choose to train your KB by:

• Selecting a website url or domain

• Entering text directly

• Uploading files

For this example, let's assume we create AI chatbot for WotNot's website to answer basic sales questions about the product. 

So, we will train the knowledge base with the website url www.wotnot.io and train 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 creating chatbots is designing the chatbot flow. Integrating and customizing the chat widget for an enhanced user experience is crucial.

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 chatbot will generate an answer.

WotNot utilizes OpenAI’s large language models called GPTs to generate an answer; this answer will strictly be generated only from the data in your KB.

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 in customer conversations

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

After the 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 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 embed 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 embed a custom 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.

By following these steps, you'll master how to create a 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 intelligent 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.

Conclusion

So, here you go—these are the steps you can follow to create your own AI chatbot. With platforms like WotNot, the process is super simple. Just sign up, build your knowledge base, design your chatbot flow, and handle any fallbacks. In no time, you’ll have an AI chatbot ready to help your customers, making your service more efficient and accessible. It’s a practical and easy way to start automating your customer interactions!

These custom ai chatbots improve user interactions and provide personalized responses. As you refine your AI chatbot, it will continually enhance its accuracy and effectiveness. Start building your AI chatbot today and transform your business processes.