Messenger Chatbots: How to Get Started

Wondering if Messenger chatbots are right for your business?

Want to know how to build your own chatbot?

To explore why and how to create Facebook Messenger chatbots, I interview Ben Beck.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode, I interview Ben Beck, a bot expert who writes a weekly column for ClearVoice.com. He has an online course focused on generating leads with chatbots.

Ben explores what you need to know to get started with chatbots.

You'll discover the best tools for creating chatbots.

Share your feedback, read the show notes, and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Messenger Chatbots
Ben's Story

Ben's relationship with bots started when he was a teenager in the mid-1990s. He chatted with ALICE, the first bot to use natural language processing. ALICE had a rudimentary interface that worked via the Internet. You typed into a little box and a response showed up. Although Ben looked at the code for ALICE, it was too complex for him to figure out how to tinker with it. However, ALICE sparked Ben's interest in chatbots and he's been watching them ever since.

Fast-forward to 2004. Ben got into online marketing, starting with SEO and online advertising. Over the last six or seven years, his interest shifted to marketing automation and email marketing. In the last five years, Ben has been using systems like HubSpot and Marketo to do email drip campaigns and as robust solutions for lead generation.

Last year, Facebook released the option to use chatbots inside of Facebook Messenger.

People naturally converse with these bots to get information about a business, submit information, get help with booking vacation plans, and more. Ben thinks bots will be the new lead generation method. Although bots may not unseat email, they'll be just as big.

Listen to the show to hear my thoughts on the impact of Facebook.

What's a Chatbot?

A chatbot is a software application built to simulate a human-like conversation. Ben believes it was Matt Schlicht, the creator of Octane AI (a chatbot-building platform), who compared chatbots to a game of tennis. For the longest time, chatbots have followed a chat-reply, chat-reply sequence (or hit it over the net, receive, hit it back). Chatbots are now starting to take on human-like capabilities.

The range of a chatbot's abilities can be huge.

For instance, if you were planning a family trip to Disneyland, you could visit their site and type questions into their pop-up box like, "What time does the park open on September 12?" and a chatbot could give you the answer. In this hypothetical example, the bot watches for certain patterns in a string to determine the response.

An advanced chatbot could use the best in artificial intelligence (AI) technology to learn. For example, Disney could take their conversations with customers over the last five or six years and feed them into their AI platform. The chatbot could become more human-like by studying questions and responses between an actual person and a park guest.

However, the way a bot learns through AI capabilities has the potential backfire. About a year ago, Microsoft released Tay, a chatbot that learned by interacting with people on Twitter. For the first day or two, tons of people interacted with Tay, but as a result of people's communications, the bot became racist and picked up other bad conversational habits, so Microsoft had to pull it down.

Listen to the show to learn more about Microsoft's chatbot fail.

Facebook Messenger Chatbots

Currently, Facebook Messenger has more than 1.2 billion users and Facebook is putting a lot of money into getting people on the platform.