Almost every customer that contacts a company for customer support has encountered or had an interaction with a chatbot. Chatbots are automated chat tools that simulate conversations with users to provide them with certain information.
They have a track record for significantly helping companies automate their basic support and have a real-time engagement tool that interacts with a website and social media visitors. Over the years, chatbots have gained the reputation of significantly reducing costs and uplifting customer engagement across channels.
You probably want to follow suit. But before deciding on other crucial factors like chatbot pricing or chatbot channels, you want the answer to the most basic question, “How do I first build the chatbot?”
There is no single-line answer to this. There are numerous options for chatbot development today that include requiring coding and are also entirely no-code. If you’re opting to build a chatbot using a programming language, you first need to get a deeper understanding of the language options you have.
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Because chatbot development will have a huge impact on the service quality and the interaction the bot will have with customers while reducing costs for businesses. To get it right, you need to aim for a programming language that suits your chatbot objectives and eases your business processes.
What are the Best Languages to Build your Chatbot?
Java
You can choose Java for its high-level features that are needed to build an Artificial Intelligence chatbot. Coding is also seamless because of its refined interface. Java’s portability is what makes it ideal for chatbot development.
Most importantly, Java holds significant popularity globally, which means it makes it easy for you to hire developers from anywhere in the world based on your budget. Java is also highly scalable since it has an inbuilt garbage collection, is lean and highly portable, and is a go-to language for easy coding with advanced features. Java provides a standard Widget toolkit that makes it convenient for chatbot developers to build a bot and monitor it regularly.
In terms of Machine Learning, Java and JavaScript both have advanced capabilities. JavaScript contains several libraries, while with Java, you can rely on Machine Learning packages such as Weka. Weka is the collection of machine learning algorithms for data mining, which proves advantageous for an AI chatbot that relies largely on the same.
Python
AI chatbots leverage a technology called Natural Language Processing (NLP) that deciphers the human language for the chatbot to interpret and give responses. NLP makes it possible for bots to not sound like bots and sound like humans instead. It also has a database of multiple languages, making it possible for developers to deploy multilingual chatbots and enhance a company’s customer support.
While NLP is widely utilized in AI chatbots for a bot to have layered human-like conversations in multiple languages, it would be interesting to note that the very first NLP integration was written in Python.
Python is, by far, the most popular programming language amongst data scientists. Research suggests that more than 57% of data scientists used python for Machine Learning.
Python offers versatility. It is a simpler language to pick up, with its human-like language capabilities as a result of years of research and development and consistent syntax. The credit for this goes to the inclusion of AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) which makes it effortless for developers to write syntax.
Python is also used for building conversational components hosted by the web server and supports an extensive library for AI chatbots. It makes it possible for developers to build chatbots that have conversational nuances and empathetic tones on python.
PHP
Cost is probably one of your top considerations when you decide to build a chatbot. While you build a tool, it must fit your budget while also giving the result you want. And if you’re one of those developers who’s looking for an affordable language, then PHP is for you. Chatbot development on PHP is quite cost-effective and its functionalities are also quicker than other scripting languages.
PHP is an open-source scripting language also with an extensive library for you to work with. It is also a great language if you’re just getting started with chatbots and still learning how to navigate the tool and its functions.
Although its machine learning capabilities aren’t as advanced as Python, it does offer the benefit of extensive documentation and options for API integrations. These integrations are necessary since without that a chatbot is limited in its performance and use case. Its open-source nature also allows a PHP-built chatbot to run on all platforms.
Clojure
Chatbots follow a chronological order of functions that flows like a conversation. Clojure allows you to build chatbots by composing code as a series of functions and is used to write a conversational flow that is hosted on the web server of the chatbot. It is a comprehensive programming language derived from Lisp, meaning it allows access to various Java frameworks.
Since Lisp was initially created as a language for AI ventures, it makes sense to consider Clojure as a language for building AI chatbots. The language has also evolved to become more efficient with its use. Clojure also allows chatbots to process multiple requests at once and provides easy-to-test functionality.
Lisp shares a code-as-data philosophy. It has a reactive agent system and is considered easy to use because of the higher-order functions.
Finishing Thoughts
Since the choice for chatbot development is many, you need to specifically pay heed what are your bot goals, the complexity of conversations you expect the bot to have, your budget and your development infrastructure available for building a chatbot.
Even if you choose the language of your choice, it won’t make a difference if your team isn’t qualified to build one or if you don’t have the infrastructure for it. All in all, choosing the language is an important first step in entering the chatbot framework. And if you already haven’t, now would be a good time to roll up your sleeves and embrace the technology.
