Microsoft offers the Azure Bot Service (replacing the former Microsoft Bot Framework), a managed bot building platform, which provides an integrated environment that is purpose-built for bot development, enabling you to build, connect, test, deploy, and manage intelligent bots, all from one place.
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Chatfuel
Score 9.9 out of 10
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Chatfuel headquartered in San Francisco provides their AI chatbot building tool for Facebook Messenger.
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.
Chatfuel is great for a small team looking to easily implement and set up Facebook chatbots for their clients for ease of community management, etc. Chatfuel is not necessarily meant for large scale operations that require complex workflows and chatbot requirements, it is limited to Facebook Messenger and is not 100% intuitive in this regard.
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.
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.
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.
Both offer bot service to reply to messages from Facebook. The difference is that Chatfuel gives you the option of being able to create conversion funnels or fixed conversation changes.
Connecting to our API is free from Chatfuel and integration with other providers has an additional cost.
AIVO has no option to create conversation flows if not through keywords.