Bot Platform Software primarily refers to a development platform for the deployment of bots across varied channels such as websites, mobile apps, social media platforms, and contact centers. 360Quadrants has identified the top 10 Bot Platform Software providers, as below:
Top Bot Platform Software Vendors in 2020
- Microsoft
- IBM Watson
- GupShup
- IPSoft
- Nuance Communications
- Next IT Corporation
- Amazon
- 24/7 Customer Inc
Top Bot Platform Features
There are a plethora of bot platforms available that add to the complexity of choosing an ideal one. However, it is very important for businesses to select one that suits their needs. Below mentioned are of some of the features that businesses can consider prior to choosing an ideal Bot Platform Software:
- Connectivity
- Scalability
- Security
- Compliance
- Multi-Language Support
- Rich Interface
- Improved Integration
- Rich Messaging Formats
- Bot Templates
- Enhanced NLP
- Webhooks
- API Integration
- Speech Analytics
- Conversation Engine
Top 10 New Entrants
These new entrants are the firms that have a great understanding of the latest technologies and trends, right from their inception. These companies may not be so widespread geographically, but they have offerings. These vendors are generally the ones who are beginning to emerge in terms of product portfolio and geographical coverage, and will need some time to gain traction in the market. Some of the emerging new entrants are:
- Rasa Technologies
- Astute Inc
- Creative Virtual
- Chatfuel
- Webio
- Logmein Inc
- Aspect Software Inc
- Botego
- Do You Dream Up
A bot is an interactive tool in applications and acts as a conversational interface for end-users who can interact with it using the text, audio, and video interface mode. Bot Platform Software helps businesses and organizations to improve customer experience by enhancing their customer communication channels. The platforms allow developers and businesses to create bots effortlessly. The main core of Bot Platform is artificial intelligence, with user friendly interface along with all required settings for customization and personalization.
Bot Platform Software market is expected to grow from USD 2.6 billion in 2019 to USD 9.4 billion in 2024 at a CAGR of 29.7% during the forecast period.
Top 25 companies offering Bot Platform software features were analyzed, shortlisted and categorized on a quadrant under Visionary Leaders, Innovators, Dynamic Differentiators, and Emerging Companies to identified best Bot Platform software providers.
Bot Platform Software Vendors who fall into this category generally receive high scores for most of the evaluation criteria. They have a robust and established product portfolio and a very strong market presence. Moreover, these vendors also have strong business strategies. This category includes top Bot Platform software vendors such as Microsoft Corporation, Facebook, IBM Corporation, Google Inc., Gupshup, IPSOFT, and Nuance Communications Inc.
The dynamic differentiator's category includes established vendors with very strong business strategies. However, they are low in the product portfolio. This category includes vendors such as Logmein Inc., Aspect Software Inc. and Amazon.
Innovators are vendors who have demonstrated substantial product innovations as compared to their competitors. They have a focused product portfolio. However, they do not have very strong growth strategies for their overall business. This category includes best Bot Platform software vendors such as 24/7 Customer Inc., Inbenta Technologies Inc., Pandorabots, Koreai, Avaamo Inc., Artificial Solutions, Cognicor Technologies, Next IT Corporation, Botego and Do You Dream Up.
Emerging companies’ category comprises vendors with niche product offerings, who are starting to gain their position in the market. They do not have very strong business strategies as compared to other established vendors. They might be new entrants in the market and require some more time before getting significant traction. This category includes vendors such as Rasa Technologies, Astute Inc., Creative Virtual, Chatfuel, Webio and Pypestream.
Importance of Bot Platform Software:
Bot Platforms software increases operational efficiency and brings cost savings to businesses while offering convenience and added services for customers. They enable companies to easily solve many types of customer queries and issues while reducing the need for human interaction.
Adopting Bot Platform technology can help organizations in the following ways:
Decreases customer waiting time: Bot Platform ensure that customers receive the immediate response that they are looking for without making them wait in a queue.
24/7 Availability: Chatbots provides 24x7 customer service.
Better customer engagement: Conversational bots can engage customers round the clock by starting proactive conservation and offering personalized recommendations that boost customer experience.
Easy Scalability: Bots can be easily scalable during peak business hours and can manage multiple customers in one go without additional costs.
Automate lead qualification & sales: Bot Platform automates sales funnel to prequalify leads and direct them in the right direction. This increase leads and conversion rates.
How does Bot Platform Software work?
Bots work by analyzing and identifying the intent of the user’s request to mine relevant entities. Once the analysis is done appropriate response is delivered to the user.
Bot Platform Software work by adopting three classification methods:
Pattern Matching: Bots utilize pattern matches to group the text and it produces an appropriate response from the clients. Artificial Intelligence is the standard structured model that is used by bots to get the right answer in the related pattern.
Natural Language Understanding: Natural language understanding enables bots to understand humans. It converts text into structured data for the machine to understand. NLU follows three specific concepts. They are entities, contexts, and expectations.
Natural language processing (NLP): Natural Language Processing bots are designed to convert the text or speech inputs of the user into structured data. The data is further used to choose a relevant answer.
Features to be considered for selecting top Bot Platform Software:
- Ubiquitous Connectivity: Bot Platform should come up with connectivity options for all major social media platforms, voice, and messaging platforms.
- Elastic and Scalable: A bot should scale-out and is based on its demand dynamically.
- Security: Bots should have provisions to authenticate, authorize, maintain confidentiality and identity of users as well as bots themselves.
- Monitoring, Logging, and Auditing: The Bot Platform software should provide rich logging mechanism to capture activities in bots and provide telemetry metrics to its owner. This should include availability, scalability and performance details among others.
- Multi-Language Development: Bot platform should provide multiple language options for the development of bots.
- Stateful and Stateless Bots: Bot platform should provide the option to build both stateful as well as stateless bots. It should provide the infrastructure through which the state can be persisted across conversations and communication mediums.
- Ability to Initiate Conversations: Bot Platform software should pro-actively start conversations with its users.
- Rich Interface: Bot platform should provide features through which rich interactions can be performed by users. Apart from text messaging, options for interacting with a bot using buttons, options and images should be available.
- Massive parallelism: Bot platform should be capable of executing requests synchronously as well as asynchronously.
How to choose the best Bot Platform Software?
Selecting the right Bot Platform can be challenging. Below are the combinations of features that can be considered while choosing Bot Platform Software.
Built-in NLP- The platform must feature basic support for natural language processing (NLP). What user should look for is language support, and how many different languages the platform can support.
The intent, Entity - These are basic necessities of the bot platform. User needs to define custom intents to design the bot dialog flow, and entities to exclusively identify important information coming from incoming user inputs.
Dialog Flow Design- A bot development platform should enable the user to design the dialog flow.
Channel Agnostic- Build a bot that can be exposed to multiple platforms, such as Facebook, Slack, or even Alexa.
Backend Integration/API-driven- Platforms should provide a way to integrate existing backend.
Easy to update and learn- Check how easy is it to introduce new flows in the conversation model or if it can be integrated into a new backend or update utterances to existing intents.
Market Trends in Bot Platform Software 2020:
- AI-driven Bots
- Ability to store customer data for analysis
- Voice experiences becoming mainstream
- Conversational bots
- Natural language understanding
- Automated call centers with AI technology
- The rise in messaging apps
- The virtual assistant takes the place of apps
Best Bot Platform Software in 2022
Analysts 
Analysts
The U.S. based messaging service company Gupshup helps other organizations develop smart colloquial skills seamlessly over a group of messaging channels using a single API. It has a complete product collection that incorporates an easy to use cross channel messaging API, advanced bot construction platform and marketing tools for mobile. This makes it flexible and seamless while the businesses also can design intelligent bots according to their needs.
Amelia conversational solution is based on cognitive AI which learns from the queries creating a more profound knowledge and increasing efficiency. Apart from this, it offers intent recognition, context switching. Amelia can mimic the human brain through spread activation. It follows an individualized process flow based on the unique information exchange within every conversation.
Logmein Inc. works on SaaS or software as a service and cloud-based remote connectivity services, client engagement and IT management. The company has developed a bot platform named the Bold 360, which is a live chat platform. This solution assists different retail, manufacturing, commercial services, telecom companies to track and analyze customer actions and come up with fitting solutions.
Pandorabots is one of the oldest chatbot hosting services platform on earth and is currently working on A.I. to run web services and chatbots deployment. The company’s Mitsuku is one of the best and most advanced chatbots which uses deep machine learning and intelligent guesses to become more functional and realistic in day to day scenarios. It can be accessed on many common messaging platforms like Kik, Messanger, Telegram and a few others.
Kore.ai is a bot-based messaging platform that relates individuals, teams, and business teams collectively in a unique modernized interface. It gives an end to end conversational AI bots platform for designing as well as training and testing the bots to make them smarter and more efficient. It can be flexibly deployed in the cloud or hybrid model also.
The Swedish multinational company Artificial Solutions promotes technology to let businesses swiftly make conversational A.I. systems to interact with software and electronic devices in any format, natural language, or using speech, writing or gestures. Teneo Platform is the company’s intellectual, human-like bot platform service which enhances customer engagement and allows over the air communications to be fast, fun, easy, and secure.
Botego is an America based company that works on and develops virtual assistant representatives, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, customer service, and some other services.Botego’s bot platform software does data retrieval faster, making it easier for organizations to understand customer’s queries better and also reduces costs. The platform also makes social media analysis by using linguistic technology to automate sentiment analysis.
Rasa Technologies is a U.S. based company that proposes an open-source machine learning tools for developers to design contextual text and voice-based chatbots and assistants. Rasa X is the company’s tool to learn from actual conversations and improve your assistant, which in turn increases the productivity of the platform. The software can easily be installed and is effortless to setup.
