I’ve personally spent over 1,000 hours building AI chatbots.
Here’s what I’ve learnt over the last 6 months, and why I think the majority of businesses are wasting a huge amount of time and resources when they decide to “build their own” AI chatbots.
Consider this, would you build your own enterprise search for your business?
Let’s start from the beginning though (as you may not be as hyped about AI chatbots as me…)
When chatbots first arrived on the scene 5 years ago, we thought we were going to be able to say goodbye to human customer support, what went wrong?
Chatbot interest over time, Google search trends
Maybe you were one of those who tried to build a chatbot on Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp or Intercom? But then you quickly realised the functionality was clunky and the logic was basic at best, forcing you to predict every question a user might ask in advance.
So customers quickly got fed up with having rigid, dead-end conversations, and, like most companies, you probably gave up on building your chatbot, consigning it to another over-hyped tech trend.
Fast forward to 2023, to the launch of ChatGPT and the rise of Large Language AI Models (LLMs).
Overnight, the capability available to you to build AI chatbots has changed radically. The technology is readily (and cheaply) available for you to create a sophisticated and intelligent AI chatbot for your business.
But the age-old software question still stands - do you build or do you buy?
“It’s never been easier to build an AI chatbot” — no doubt you’ll have heard this countless times in all those daily AI newsletters.
You’ve probably been eyeing up Langchain or Llama Index, read their docs and a few tutorials, and fancy deploying your own AI bot in a weekend hack.
In fact, here’s exactly how you’d do it: