Chat bots: interlocutors for all occasions

Recently, chat bots have gained serious popularity, turning from entertainment for geeks into almost must have-features in various messengers, social networks and websites. And in many cases, chat bots are used not to entertain an idle public, but to solve very serious business problems. They simply do it in a more friendly and confidential manner, in a completely natural form of dialogue for a person. Even more: in the form of individual correspondence. And what can be more natural today, in the era of the Internet, instant messengers and a smartphone in every pocket? Therefore, we also thought about how to equip our cloud service “Bitrix24” to organize the work of companies with such a useful and popular tool. And a little more than a month ago they released their own platform for creating chat bots.

A chat bot is an application that can support a written dialogue with a user, select answers from a database and respond to a certain set of commands. Today, chat bots from the “client-client” segment are mainly represented on the market. That is, these are communication tools (and entertainment) between ordinary users. A platform adapted for solving business problems, much less.

What tasks can chat bots solve in the business segment?
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• Perform routine operations . There are always some fairly simple and monotonous tasks for which you don’t want to waste staff time, but which chat bots are quite capable of. In this case, the chat bot will not need to force himself to work, to persuade him to take up the boring work: he will do everything quickly and accurately. Of course, as far as his algorithms allow.
• Search and aggregation data . Chat bots can also be used to collect materials for subsequent analytics. Naturally, this is done through communication with people. Chat bots can also be a kind of channel for disseminating information within the company or as part of a service, giving news to all participants and providing background information.
• The first line of work with clients, assistants, consultants . Chat bots help keep a visitor entertaining him or offering primary information until he becomes free and a person is invited to join the conversation. Chat bot is also useful for contacting visitors after hours. He helps to create a pleasant impression of the company by asking for contact details so that you can contact the client during business hours.
  
  Chat bots can answer typical questions, help navigate the site or in the application, suggesting where you can find these or other tools, conducting a kind of "tour" of the product.
  
  Electronic assistants in accordance with the requests are able to offer visitors certain goods, saving them from walking in the catalog. It is also a good tool for provoking spontaneous purchases.
• Just for Fun . Finally, no one cancels the entertainment function, there should always be a place to smile.

Our bot platform

Our chat bot, using the technology of machine learning company "Nanosemantika", built into the service "Bitrix24" by default. Also within the framework of Bitrix24, two more chatbots work: Giphy, which finds animated gif-images at the request of the service user, and Counterparty Details, a chat bot that allows you to find the details of any company from the Federal Tax Service of Russia.

The bots developed by the company's partners can be found in the ready-made application store for Bitrix24 . We have identified a separate bot-section " Chat Bots ", in which 10 bots are already available for installation in Bitrix24.

Chat bot Martha

Martha is the interlocutor. She is our virtual assistant, developed jointly with the company Nanosemantika. Martha is able to keep up the conversation on common topics. It can help navigate the functionality of Bitrix24, tell you where to look for answers to specific questions, and recommend useful links. Martha can also remind you of meetings and perform some tasks.

Chat bot giphy

Giphy (Gifi) - entertaining bot. At the user's request, he finds and sends animated gifs on specified topics.

Chat bot CONTRACTING DETAILS

Counterparty Requisites is a classic business bot integrated with the database of the Federal Tax Service of Russia (the Federal Tax Service). He is able to search for companies from the list of the Federal Tax Service for the TIN, OGRN, company name or the name of the manager.

Bots from partners for "Bitrix24"

In the store of ready applications for Bitrix24, there are still useful bots - one of them, Translator , implemented by PWEB, can translate texts from one language to another and supports 63 languages. The other, OCR Bot from First open systems, is able to recognize scans of any documents and save them in RTF text format.

Bot Platform Features

In our bot platform, we implemented all the key points that have become the standard for chat bots today.

In particular:

• In the group chat, the bot responds only to those messages that were sent to him personally (for this you need the bot to mention, for example, "@Martha, tell me about CRM").
• The bot supports processing slash commands: enter the / character and the list of commands understood by the bot will appear. Also in the messages of the bot, you can display active links.
• The bot also works in a tete-a-tete mode.
  
  
  
  Commands can be global (available in any chat), local (available only when communicating with a specific bot) and hidden (available only when accessed through active links or keyboards).
• The platform supports the use of put-commands , when the user does not need to type a long message entirely, but rather just add it. For example, you need statistics for such a number. In order not to enter "give statistics" and some command, you can make a separate button, when pressed, you automatically type the necessary phrase in which you just need to enter the required date.
• You can control the bot not only with words and commands, but with the help of buttons that can be displayed in the message from the bot. Many users are much more familiar and convenient to press buttons. They can be of different sizes, colors, arranged in rows. You can implement mini-pages with buttons. The buttons themselves can be links, or they can execute some programmed commands, for example, display company details.
  
  
  
  
  
  Here is an example of a non-standard button usage scenario:
  
  
• The platform supports a message constructor that allows you to collect beautiful and functional “rich messages” from blocks. The following blocks are available for today:
  
  
  • User block
  • Link block
  • Text block
  • Block separator
  • The block to build rows and columns
  • Image block
  • Block with files
  
  With the help of advanced formatting and free placement of elements, you can create templates for different types of messages, display data more clearly. In general, the design of bot messages is largely limited only by your imagination.
  
  
  
  
• Push notifications . One of the advantages of chat bots is their convenience for obtaining information by company employees. Entering the browser on a smartphone is not very convenient, it is much faster and easier to request some data from the chat bot. And when he collects them, then immediately report it.

Chat bot operation:

1. The user writes a message in the chat
2. A POST request is sent to the application server.
3. The application processes it.
4. Sends a command to Bitrix24 via REST API

The bots in Bitrix24 can not only respond to user actions, but also be active in initiating a session. For example, a user spoke with a bot and forgot about it, but after a while he may remind about himself.

What you need to develop your bot?

We tried to make the bot platform as simple as possible to ensure the lowest possible entry threshold for creating our own bots. We believe that we have completed the task, because on March 17 the first draft of documentation for external developers was published, and on March 18, the first partner bot was posted in the application store for Bitrix24.

The easiest way to write a bot on our platform is to download a demo bot (bot echotest that simply repeats everything you write to it) and modify it to suit your needs. This bot already has a full set of features, it is not a stripped-down version. It is enough to install it on your hosting, change the logic and publish it in the application catalog. A bot is provided in the form of a PHP file, but with the help of our API you can write your bot in any other language.



If you need a much wider or specific chat bot functionality, then you can use the SDK developed by our partner . It works perfectly and is suitable for solving your problems:

• Free Library, MIT License.
• Supports most of the Rest API.
• Fully supports Chat API.
• Fully supports bot API.
• This SDK is actively used by more than 200 partners.
• Among the companies working in Bitrix24 that have installed applications, in more than 30% of cases there is at least one application using the SDK.

This tool is presented in the public domain. It has all the typical functionality: working with CRM, tasks, chats, users, etc. All code is written according to OOP principles and you can easily use it based on modern IDEs.

Platform documentation

At the moment we are compiling the final version of the documentation, but there is already a draft available and several articles on how to work with it.
The draft is available (and constantly updated) on our website for developers. Final documentation is planned for publication in the coming weeks.

You can register here: https://dev.bitrix24.ru/
Then read this message: https://dev.bitrix24.ru/company/personal/user/2664/blog/1024/

General documentation .
Formatting options .
"Rich" posts .
" Typing keyboard ."
Text commands .
Download demo-bots (We placed a test bot on BitBacket, you can read it on this link).