Amazon Lex vs. Azure AI Bot Service vs. Fin by Intercom

If you wish to quickly deploy multilingual chatbots without having to worry about infrastructure and model training, go for Amazon Lex. It is one of the best general-purpose conversational AI solutions in the market. The cherry on the cake is that it also seamlessly integrates with other AWS services, so you would be good there. Performance monitoring is very easy with AWS. It has support for both text and integration. If you are not a pro-NLP expert, Amazon Lex will make your job really easy.

Incentivized

From personal experience, I can recommend the Azure AI service to reduce the burden on your customer service team, as we did. We created a customer service bot and automated our Frequently Asked Questions section, as well as an interactive platform for registering other complaints that the bot cannot handle, which are later addressed by our customer service team.

Incentivized

Fin is great for using for first line support. We use Fin for conversations where customers have a standard question, and Fin is able to pull from our content to answer this accurately and go above and beyond to include some basic problem solving. This really helps us free up our Support Team's time for more complex queries. Fin isn't appropriate for us on technical issues or conversations which require human support. We've had to remove Fin from interacting on these conversations as customers were becoming frustrated with speaking to AI, or having Fin be unable to problem solve. However, this was easy to set up through Intercom, and now customers with complex questions/situations or bugs/technical issues do not engage with Fin and Fin only handles suitable conversations.

• Assembles conversational AI encounters for our clients
• Adds regular language, discourse, and vision
• Sends to well known channels with insignificant code changes

• Serves as the first point of interaction.
• Answers questions based on the knowledge base.
• Tries to suggest a solution for reported issues (in some cases).
• Gives the option to improve its answer.
• Learns from other conversations and replies by humans.
• Understands other languages.
• Interprets images (somewhat).

Incentivized

• Limited Natural Language Understanding, especially in entertainment contexts where slang, humor
• Works only with Azure platform only not compatible with other platforms
• Complex customization as per organization need

Incentivized

• It seems some users really struggle to figure out how to escalate to a human (especially through email).
• Not excited about how "soft" resolutions still count as resolutions and are paid for. Though some abandoned cases appear to be able to be concluded as "the user got the answer they needed", there are others where they clearly didn't, because they just open up another chat (or even more), trying to get more info. This pads the resolution stats and makes it seem more effective than it actually is.
• Cost -- Fin is quite expensive. It helps us with scaling coverage, but we're not really saving money.

We have been and will be continuing our journey with Intercom and nothing too concerning has happened that I have experienced or heard of that has us on the edge yet. If it ever happens it will be something along the lines of "Outgrowing" the use of need of the platform.

Incentivized

Easy to deploy and very easy to integrate with other AWS services. Automating simple tasks is also very easy with Amazon Lex. We never had NLP experts in our team, but we were still able to deploy chatbots for our support functions with minimal issues. Native integration with other AWS services like S3 and Lambda has been of paramount importance.

Incentivized

Azure AI Bot Service comes with an Integrated Development Environment and Bot Framework SDK that simplifies development. Having a single codebase for multiple channels, such as MS Teams, Facebook, and Slack, makes it easier to target multiple platforms without requiring redevelopment. LUIS and OpenAI can be easily integrated with your Chatbot to provide a seammless chat bot expereince to customers.

Incentivized

From an administration standpoint, Fin is very easy to set up, train, and test. Having the ability to impersonate a user in our system to see how Fin responds is huge. It lets you test several situations and throw curveballs at it (as customers will) without the risk of setting Fin live and wondering what will happen. It's also easy to fine-tune. Some chatbots you can never quite get right without spending hours on, but Fin usually takes a few minutes to dial it in. From a customer standpoint, Fin couldn't be easier to engage with. We tell customers up front it's an AI bot and they're wow'd with the experience

Incentivized

always there

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works perfect

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Community support for Amazon Lex is good. Also, since it is an AWS service, the support has a similar standard as other AWS services. We have had a couple of instances of our bots weren't able to interact with our web apps. We reached out to the support team, and they were able to resolve our issue in no time. The documentation from the Amazon Lex team also makes creating chatbots a breeze.

Incentivized

Microsoft's customer service staff is friendly and extremely knowledgeable. They are always available to assist you with bot framework-related issues that you may be experiencing. They provide training sessions, manuals, and support personnel, among other things. Bugs were easily spotted and patched, which was one of my pet peeves about patching.

Incentivized

Intercom is the premier customer support/engagement model and it definitely has one of the top tier customer support teams as well. I don't think I have ever waited more than 5 minutes to get the information I need or get help with an issue. They are incredible and I aim to model our customer service department after them.

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Easy to know the learning path

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The implementation was surprisingly easy but we are having to adapt from our old process to work well with Intercom.

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Microsoft Bot Framework is much better and well more established without a lot of proprietary software/coding language. Lex is very limited with integration with standard hardware and network configurations. Lex has performance issues and was too slow to meet near real-time collaboration requirements. Bot Framework complements many other Microsoft communication products and this was key to implementing without a lot of new training required.

Incentivized

We only used the free live chat version from HubSpot, so Intercom is yards better! If I were just comparing an actual live chat between the two tools, HubSpot was often clunky and delayed, and it was hard to find past conversation information

Incentivized

• Support satisfaction has increased
• Time to resolve customer concerns has seen a major improvement
• Amazon Lex can quickly automate repetitive simple tasks for us
• Our organization has built NLP capability without having to hire language experts/linguists
• Since the integration with AWS services is natively supported, our existing DevOps team can manage our Amazon Lex deployment

Incentivized

• Azure Bot will only deliver according to the granularity of the FAQ it is feed. Otherwise, it has been a cost optimization tool for our organization.

• New role opportunities — Using the “Fin-first” approach has reduced the workload for our Tier 1 team, giving them more time to focus on their own career growth. It’s also opened the door to a dedicated, AI-focused role, where a team member regularly reviews Fin’s answers and makes updates to help it perform even better.
• Enabling Fin has also reduced our response time and allowed us to meet SLA's.

Incentivized