Designing a Chatbot with Amazon Lex and Twilio Chat

Are you a business owner? Does your business really need chatbots?

The answer to the above question depends on the type of business and the intensity of innovation and technology that drives you. In recent times, we have seen how businesses are desperate to introduce chatbots! Today, the tough competition makes it mandatory for every business to adopt innovative technology.

Businesses must catch a unique trend to be early enough to grab profit immensely and maintain a successful algorithm for the long term. For a couple of years, AI chatbot and chatbot development have emerged as the most followed trend.

Making a chatbot in Amazon Lex and making a chatbot in Twilio are vastly different endeavors, Lex involves making a chatbot through a more AI-based approach, and with Twilio we can make a simple question-answer bot, don’t get me wrong both approaches have their pros and cons which we will be looking at in this article. Firstly, we will be looking at Lex.

Firstly, in Lex there are intents, they denote the intention of the user, which are sophisticated functions that activate when the user enters some sample utterances. Secondly, there are sample utterances which are a part of intents, they do the work of deciding based on what user enters which intent to call, if you enter some sample utterances the AI will make sure if someone enters something similar then also it will trigger the intent. Then there are slots, which are used to store user input in different variables.

They already have some predefined slot types which are very useful in case you want to take a standard input like Date, Time, Name, Phone Number, Email, etc. They are really helpful because the user can enter in any format and it will convert it to a single format which is super useful and you don’t have to worry about taking input where the user has multiple choices to enter the same thing, for example, we need the user to enter data there are many formats in which a user can enter a date. Lex understands every format there is without any extra effort. This helps a lot when making a standard bot.

1. Chatbot Trends Report 2021

2. 4 DO’s and 3 DON’Ts for Training a Chatbot NLP Model

3. Concierge Bot: Handle Multiple Chatbots from One Chat Screen

4. An expert system: Conversational AI Vs Chatbots

In Twilio bot the way to make a chatbot is very different than Lex, what do I mean by that? I mean that in Twilio everything has to be done by creating a flow chart as in how should a conversation will flow, this is done through a set of drag and drop options whatever you want you can drop it from the list and integrate it with the flow

chart. There are various options like send a message, send a message and wait for a reply for the user to enter something, then then you can perform different things based on what they enter. This way you can customize the flow however you want. It gives you incredible flexibility on how you want your chatbot to behave.

I’m an AWS expert and AWS Certified Architect, AWS Certified Sysops Administrator and AWS Developer Associate. I take up AWS assignments as well. You can reach me at Linkedin.

Source: https://chatbotslife.com/designing-a-chatbot-with-amazon-lex-and-twilio-chat-829f5e42a73b?source=rss—-a49517e4c30b—4