Build a Facebook BOT using Chatfuel

Artificial Intelligence and BOT development are among hot topics which seem to be very promising and thus are being worked on and developed recently.

According to Forbes, what seems to get great attention during the next 12 months is “BOTs’ development”, and if you are wondering, these “BOTs” are not something new, they have been around for a long time, it’s just that these days, they are being integrated into almost every aspect of our daily life applications.

Let’s start with an introduction of what BOTs are and how they came to be such a widely used “tool” in our daily lives and one of the main development point in the technology.

About BOT

BOTs are a type of Artificial Intelligence technology, a software application that can complete the task in an automated way, without needing human intervention.

In the last about three years use of Artificial Intelligence sharply increased, Global players like Google, Microsoft are heavily focusing on AI based innovation and investing huge time and cost to enhance AI usability almost for every industry.

There are plenty of BOT or ChatBOT platforms offer great development capability without doing. So now, moving forward to create a simple Facebook Messenger BOT using the great platform “Chatfuel“.

Chatfuel is a very advanced platform in comparison to other platforms to create Facebook messenger BOT, and no need to do coding at all. In addition, Chatfuel is a free BOT-building platform with very simple Admin Dashboard.

Let’s start creating a Facebook BOT in very easy and simple steps.

Preequisites:

1. Facebook Page – A Facebook page is required to create the BOT because a BOT will be attached to that page.

Once you’ve signed up, you will be redirected to Chatfuel Dashboard.

In the Dashboard, you’ll be able to create and manage BOTs but at a time one BOT can be active on the page.

Typical Interface of Chatfuel Dashboard will look like below:

Click on the BOT to train your first Facebook BOT. Once you select the BOT, Chatfuel provides plenty of ways to configure and train your BOT.

Let’s take the overview of the available options:

Automate

Using Automate, you can create sequences of message blocks.

A message block can be Text, Typings, Quick Reply, Image, Gallery, Go to Block, to Sequence. Message block and sequences are reusable.

Chatfuel also provides rich plugins like JSON API, User Input, Google Search, Slack, Twitter, Instagram, etc. Full list is displayed below:

Set up AI

In the AI section, you’ll be able to set up key phrases and the corresponding BOT replies, a BOT will automatically understand user phrases similar to those you’ve set up and reply with some text or a message block.

You can add AI rules, In the AI rule you can simply add the two blocks, one is for what your user says and in the second one what your BOT’s reply.

Simple example

If the user says something similar to Hi, Hello
BOT replies: Hello, Hey

If the user says something similar to How are you?
BOT replies: I am fine, thank you.

Broadcast

The broadcast will allow you to broadcast your message to multiple users.

It allows you to proactively reach out to your audience. Filter your targeted users based on their attributes and send personalized messages.

You can send a message right away, schedule it for later or triggered send based on any event.

Configure

In the configuration tab, you can configure your BOT. You can connect or disconnect the BOT from the Facebook page.

Chatfuel also provides support for Localization to setup your BOT for multiple languages.

You can configure Timezone, get broadcasting API token and other settings and option to upgrade to PRO plan.

Growth and Analyze

You can add Custome Chat Plugin to your website, this will allow you to place a Messanger chat window right on your website. All the site visitors can chat on the page and become your BOT subscribers. You can enable Custome Chat Plugin from the Growth tab.

You can also check the User activity on the Analyze tab. There are several other analytics provided to get the statistics of your Facebook BOT. It also allows you to integrate third-party analytics tools with you Facebook BOT.

That’s all. You’ve got your Facebook BOT ready and you can train it as per the requirements.
For more details, you check the blog section of the Chatfuel from here.

Happy coding, stay awesome!