Chatbots are used by 1.4 billion people today. Companies are launching their best AI chatbots to carry on 1:1 conversations with customers and employees. AI powered chatbots are also capable of automating various tasks, including sales and marketing, customer service, and administrative and operational tasks.
As the demand for chatbot software has skyrocketed, the marketplace of companies that provide chatbot technology has become harder to navigate as competition increases with many companies promising to do the same thing. However, not all AI chatbots are the same. To help companies of all sizes find the best of the best, we’ve rounded up the best 17 AI chatbots for specific business use cases. We’ll also cover the 5 best chatbot examples in the real world, but more on that later.
In this post, we’ll dive into everything you need to know about AI chatbot solutions, including:
- What is an AI chatbot?
- Best AI Chatbots for 2023
- AI Chatbot Frequently Asked Questions
- The 5 Best AI Chatbot Examples in Real Life
Before we jump into the 17 best AI chatbots, it’s important to differentiate between AI chatbots and rules-based bots. The first-generation bots that many companies adopted were very rigid and provided poor user experiences. Rules-based chatbots are limited to very basic scenarios.
What is an AI chatbot?
AI-powered chatbots provide a more human-like experience, are capable of carrying on natural conversation, and continuously improve over time. While basic chatbot technology moves the conversation forward via bot-prompted keywords or UX features like Facebook Messenger’s suggested responses, AI-powered chatbots use natural language processing and leverage semantics to understand the context of what a person is saying.
The most powerful AI chatbots have the most sophisticated artificial intelligence software built. So what does a powerful customer service chatbot look like? Here’s an example of what a powerful AI chatbot might look like if you could see it.
Though you won’t see a purple glowing orb literally tracking and shooting down tickets, smart backend software can solve hundreds of tickets or tasks per second. On the other hand, agents who work with low-quality AI chatbots (or none at all) might be stuck doing the manual work like this:
Without further ado, let’s take a look at the best AI chatbots for 2023 and beyond.
Best AI Chatbots for 2023
| Rank | AI Chatbot | Rating (Out of 5 Stars) |
| 1. | Netomi | 5 |
| 2. | ChatGPT | 4.85 |
| 3. | atSpoke | 4.8 |
| 4. | WP-Chatbot | 4.7 |
| 5. | Microsoft Bot Framework | 4.6 |
| 6. | Zendesk Answer Bot | 4.6 |
| 7. | x.ai | 4.5 |
| 8. | CSML.dev | 4.5 |
| 9. | Alexa for Business | 4.4 |
| 10. | Drift | 4.4 |
| 11. | Salesforce Einstein | 4.4 |
| 12. | Dasha AI | 4.3 |
| 13. | SurveySparrow | 4.25 |
| 14. | LivePerson | 4.2 |
| 15. | ManyChat | 4.15 |
| 16. | Intercom | 4.1 |
| 17. | Replika | 4.1 |
- Best AI Chatbot for Customer Service: Netomi
- Natural Language Understanding for human-like conversation
- Reinforcement learning and ongoing optimization
- Sentiment analysis for contextual next best action
- Back-end systems integrations (CRM, OMS, etc.) for meaningful and personalized resolutions
- Human escalation via agent desk integration (Zendesk, Freshworks, Salesforce, Khoros, Zoho, Sprinklr, Shopify)
- Knowledge-base integration
- Omni-channel (email, chat, voice, social)
- Analytics and real-time reporting
- Multi-lingual
- Dedicated customer success team
- Best AI Chatbot for Entertainment: ChatGPT
- Engage in conversation with users in a natural and human-like manner
- Easily integrates with a variety of applications and platforms
- Handles a wide range of conversational topics and scenarios
- Learn and adapt to new situations and contexts
- Best AI Chatbot for IT, HR and Business Ops: atSpoke
- Omnichannel (chat, email, and SMS customer service)
- Alerts / Escalation
- Automated Routing
- Knowledge Base Management
- Reporting/Analytics
- Workflow Configuration
- Best AI Chatbot for WordPress: WP-Chatbot
- One-click-install for WordPress
- Customization
- Custom greeting
- Facebook page branding
- Single inbox for all incoming messages
- Integration with your Facebook Business Page
- Compatible with all versions of WordPress
- Best Open Source AI Chatbot: Microsoft Bot Framework
- AI and natural language
- Open source SDK and tools to build, test, and connect bots to popular channels and devices
- integrate with existing IT ecosystem
- Omnichannel experience (website or apps, Microsoft Teams, Skype, Slack, Cortana, and Facebook Messenger)
- Speech capabilities
- Best Agent Desk AI Chatbot: Zendesk Answer Bot
- Multilingual
- Omnichannel (email, Web forms, chat, in-app)
- Integrates with Zendesk Guide knowledge base
- Integrates within Zendesk agent desk platform for seamless human hand-off
- Deep learning
- Getting Started with Netomi on Zendesk
- Zendesk customers now have access to the Netomi Virtual Agent
- 5 Ways Customer Service Managers Can Create a Better Experience With AI
- Best AI Chatbot To Be Your Personal Assistant: x.ai
- Meeting Scheduler
- Meeting Tracker
- Auto-Responder
- Google Calendar Integration
- Outlook.com Calendar Integration
- Office 365 Calendar Integration
- User Access Control
- Analytics & Reporting
- Best AI Chatbot for Developers: CSML.dev
- Super easy syntax and conversation-oriented components
- Short and long-term memory slots
- Integrates out of the box with over 70 other apps (CRM, ticketing, databases, livechat, and more)
- Chatbot activity analytics
- Ready-to-use chatbot templates library
- Best AI Chatbot for Voice: Alexa for Business
- Self-service APIs to help you create, manage, test and publish custom skills
- Request APIs receive intents and directives from Alexa in your application logic
- Respond to customers using text-to-speech, images, and streamed audio and video
- Transactions and closed-loop commerce
- SDKs for Node.js, Python and Java
- Best AI Chatbot for Sales: Drift
- A chat widget for mobile and desktop
- Routing that directs leads and conversations to the correct person, group or team
- SDKs for JavaScript Web, Android mobile, and iOS mobile and web
- an API for building apps, customizing the chat widget or integrating with your platform
- Out-of-the-box integrations, including: Slack, Office 365 Calendar, Salesforce and Market
- Best AI Chatbot for Salesforce Fanatics: Salesforce Einstein
- Powerful Conversational AI
- Capable of triage and routing to human agents when necessary
- Seamless integration with other SalesForce products
- Requires Salesforce Service Cloud
- Best AI Chatbot for Call Centers: Dasha AI
- Human-indistinguishable speech synthesis
- Unlimited conversational depth
- You own the Intellectual Property to all Dasha apps you build
- The SDK integrates into your existing infrastructure seamlessly
- Voice over GRPC means that you can add live AI conversations to your websites or mobile apps
- Robust digressions and intents, stacked named entities
- Ultra-high conversational concurrency
- The SDK integrates into your existing infrastructure seamlessly
- Best AI Chatbot for User or Market Research: SurveySparrow
- Customized conversational surveys
- Subaccounts and multiple users
- Multi-language surveys
- Smart surveys using conditional logic branching
- White label surveys
- Visual workflows
- Omni-channel (email, social media, web links, embedded options, scannable QR code and email)
- Reports and analytics
- Best AI Chatbot for the Conversational Cloud: LivePerson
- Integrates with most channels aside from email
- Ability to pull time-based reports
- Intuitive interface
- Real-time analytics dashboard
- Enterprise-focused pricing
- Best Build-Your-Own AI Chatbot for Messenger: ManyChat
- Basic reporting and analytics
- Drag-and-drop interface to build bot
- Integrations with Shopify, Google Sheets, MailChimp, HubSpot, ConvertKit, and Zapier
- No coding required
- Easy set up in minutes
- Best AI Chatbot for Marketers: Intercom
- Intercom’s Business Messenger offers engaging customer support
- Powerful integration set with over 250 out-of-the-box apps
- Uses both business and customer data to personalize experiences
- Seamless experience between desktop and mobile
- Machine learning models can help answer up to 33% of inquiries automatically
- No free tier with expensive higher tiers compared to other options
- Best AI Companion and Friend Chatbot: Replika
- Learns to imitate users
- Messaging and voice recognition
- iOS and Android apps
- Customizable avatar
AI Chatbot Frequently Asked Questions
How Do AI Chatbots Work?
AI chatbots use Natural Language Processing (NLP) engines and machine learning to interpret user inputs. This involves extracting user entities and determining user intents. These NLP methods are used widely in the technology industry, including for machine translation, sentiment analysis, and user behavior analytics (UBA) in cybersecurity.
What is a Chatbot Platform?
A chatbot platform allows businesses to host multiple AI chatbots all in one place. Chatbot platforms are crucial when companies want to deploy chatbots across multiple communication channels like messenger, SMS, email, and directly on the website. Having all your chatbots organized in one place ensures maximum efficiency and learning opportunities as the AI inevitably gets more sophisticated.
Is Siri a Chatbot?
Siri is considered a basic chatbot. Even though Siri sounds smart at times, Sirilacks the natural language processing and human-like conversational ability of more advanced AI chatbots.
How Can Chatbots Help Save Me Money?
Chatbots can help save you money by automating routine tasks that humans would otherwise complete. Imagine that you owned a business where five different types of questions made up for over 50% of the total questions by volume. Without a chatbot, a customer service agent would have to answer each question one by one. On the other hand, a chatbot could answer an unlimited amount of the same customer service question type in an instant. This allows businesses to save their support agents’ time while maintaining a quality customer experience.
What Makes an AI Chatbot Powerful?
What separates a bad chatbot from the best chatbots is a bot’s ability to leverage four different categories of artificial intelligence. The best AI chatbots are extremely sophisticated in these 4 AI attributes:
- Intent recognition—intent recognition involves a semantic understanding of text-based and AI chatbots that leverage general syntactical and semantic knowledge which they learn from a large corpus of language data and business-specific training samples. Knowledge learned by AI chatbots from large data sources helps for the expansion and transfer of vocabulary which helps to improve interpretations with fewer business-specific training samples.
- Extraction of entities—information that relates to a specific object or concept. For example, dates, places, times, descriptions, names, items, or numbers. These bits of data are the building blocks from which inputs are interpreted and defined.
- Dialogue management—Based on intent and entities, AI Chatbots use the next best action to trigger various actions required to capture appropriate details from users and business systems for meaningful resolution. AI chatbots learn user preferences in their long and short-term memory to take contextually relevant smart actions.
- Expansion and transfer of vocabulary—algorithms can capture and refine vocabulary, including synonyms to improve interpretations. These refinements are tied to subsets of users to generate more natural responses and be passed to new bots.
The strongest chatbot platforms (listed earlier) allow for easy scalability and low manual effort. Now you know what makes the best AI chatbots so powerful.
The 5 Best AI Chatbot Examples in Real Life
As chatbots get smarter, the adoption rate by big brands and industry leaders grows exponentially. Now that we’ve taken a look at which companies make the best AI chatbot technology and how to define what makes one chatbot better than another, let’s explore real-life examples of companies that put those chatbots to work. Below are five of the most successful chatbot implementations and their results:
1. Best AI Chatbot Overall: WestJet’s Chatbot
Company Background
WestJet, the only 3-peat winner of TripAdvisor’s Best Airline in Canada, has incorporated a chatbot to help serve its millions of monthly website visitors. With its chatbot “Juliet,” users can book travel plans, ask questions and get resolutions to common customer service questions.
Chatbot Results
When WestJet’s bot first got started, it could automatically resolve about 30% of all customer service tickets. In less than two years, that number has jumped to over 87%. Not only is this the highest rate of automated ticket resolution ever recorded – making WestJet’s Juliet the most powerful chatbot in the world – it also speaks to the sophistication of how true artificial intelligence can learn and get better over time. As a result, the WestJet customer service agents are able to work side-by-side with the AI bot and handle over 5X the normal load of customer support.
Interested in learning more about WestJet’s chatbot, Juliet, check out one of these resources below.
- WestJet Takes the Flying Experience Up a Notch with AI
- WestJet Reduces Customer Resolution Time, Taking the Guest Experience Up a Notch
- WestJet’s Juliet Now Answering Questions on Google Assistant
- WestJet’s Juliet Now Available on WhatsApp
2. Best AI Chatbot for Telecom: Charter Spectrum’s Chatbot
Company Background
Charter Spectrum, a top cable and phone service provider in the U.S. has incorporated a chatbot into its customer service operations. Before launching its bot, Charter’s customer support agents were answering around 200k live chats per month, a large portion of these for common use cases including forgotten passwords or usernames.
Chatbot Results
After bringing the “Ask Spectrum” chatbot into its customer support team, Charter Spectrum was able to handle 83% of chat tickets without human intervention. This significantly lightened their customer service load and resulted in a 300% increase in ROI.
To download a copy of our Telecom Customer Service Benchmark report, visit here.
3. Best AI Chatbot for Ecommerce: Covergirl’s Chatbot
Company Background
Covergirl, a popular makeup brand, has taken a different approach. They are leveraging chatbots to engage with teens by providing product information and disseminating coupons. The Covergirl bot was designed to help the brand address the role that social media influencers play in young customer’s lives. Customers can interact with the bot to get product information and coupons for items.
Chatbot Results
As a result of their ecommerce chabot, Covergirl has seen social media engagement increase by a factor of 14. They have also experienced 91% positive sentiment ratings and a 51% click-through on coupons.
To download a copy of our retail Customer Service Benchmark report, visit here.
4. Best AI Chatbot for Travel: Amtrak’s Chatbot
Company Background
Amtrak, a nationwide rail provider in the United States, launched a travel chatbot to provide support to its 375k daily website visitors. With the Amtrak chatbot, users can book travel, ask common questions, and seek assistance modeled on the company’s best customer service representatives.
Chatbot Results
Currently, Amtrak’s bot is responding to around 5 million requests per year. This has led to a 25% increase in bookings and a 30% increase in revenue. Overall this has meant an 800% increase in ROI.
To learn how AI is completely transforming the travel experience, download this eBook.
5. Best AI Chatbot for Customer Experience: Johnson and Johnson’s Chatbot
Company Background
Johnson and Johnson owns a pregnancy and childcare resource called The BabyCentre UK. The company introduced a bot on Facebook Messenger to provide information and content to new or expecting moms. The bot uses targeting and personalization to deliver relevant information and to answer popular queries from users.
Chatbot Results
As a result of the bot, BabyCentre saw an 84% engagement rate and a 53% click-through rate. This represented a 1,428% increase over email communications despite using the same personalization methods.
Conclusion
The Best AI Chatbots can unlock incredible efficiency, but you need to select the right AI partner. The breadth of AI chatbots available today is incredible. The best business-specific AI chatbots are focused on a core use case – whether it’s customer service, surveys, administrative tasks or sales. With 53% of organizations expecting to use chatbots within 18 months, it’s crucial that teams adopt the right technology that prioritizes the end-user experience, exceeds goals, is easy to adopt and works seamlessly with other business systems. Therefore, as an increasing number of companies claim to have sophisticated AI platforms, not all AI chatbots are created equal.
Source: https://www.netomi.com/best-ai-chatbot