Dialogflow (formerly Api.ai) is a chatbot building tool, designed to give users new ways to interact with digital products by building engaging voice and text-based conversational interfaces powered by AI.
Dialogflow was acquired by Google in 2019.
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ManyChat
Score 7.3 out of 10
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ManyChat headquartered in San Francisco provides their chatbot building platform to deploy Facebook messenger chatbots for support and service.
$10
per month
Storify (discontinued)
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Storify was a social curation platform that collects updates from social networks, to create a new story format that is interactive, dynamic and social. It was acquired by Adobe, and has been retired (May 2018).
Indicated for those who have good knowledge of programming and coding in HTML and JSON, that is, it is not suitable for beginners or users without much technical knowledge. It is suitable for those who want to integrate with various platforms, such as Telegram, Webhat, Facebook Messenger, among others. I also recommend it to anyone who needs to create a chatbot in several languages (it is not automatic translation). Recommended to create new projects in CX environment and not in ES.
I found that ManyChat is a strong tool when receiving incoming messages, being able to create a tree of potential responses based on options given to the initiator. There is also a huge potential for complex automation (as long as the environment required by Facebook in order to send outgoing messages is maintained).
I would advise that Storify is easy to use and includes many built-in resources, such as search tools, but that its application can be improved even more by combining it with other tools such as Google News (also accessible in Storify, but using standalone site is easy), Twitter (corporate and 3rd party) search tools and media management / "clipping" services like Vocus
In today's world, some stories break or even take place on social media. Storify allows journalists to easily curate these conversations about news and shape them into stories.
Storify's interface is easy to use and can be taught in minutes. My college journalism students take to it quickly and love working with it.
Storify can employ any social media that I can think of. If a story is being discussed in the social media world, you can find it in words, photos, videos, etc.
Telling stories through Storify is a creative process that I see becoming more prominent in the future.
Products you create in Storify are easy to embed or use for other purposes.
Honestly, the only thing I don't like about ManyChat is their support. It seems to be almost non existent. However, that concern is negated by having a fantastic user base that helps each other out on Facebook.
We like to live-tweet academic conferences and events. We think of it as collaborative note-taking. Storify is a great place to "file" these notes for later reference, but it falls a bit short as a place to go during the live-tweeted event. This is due to the fact that it is slow to refresh, if I add a tweet to the story, it can take up to a few minutes for it to appear for other users viewing that story. So we definitely use Storify in these events, but it's an after thought rather than an integrated part of the live activity.
Storify is not as powerful as other social media platforms when it comes to driving new audiences to our content. Facebook, Twitter, and Google + help us expand our networks. Storify is more functional as an organization tool that we can use to engage our existing network.
Each Storify story seems to exist in a silo. It does not make natural connections between stories that might be emerging around the same interest or topic. In academics for example, we have created Storify stories around the value of a Liberal Arts Education. It turns out that others were doing the same, but we only discovered that by accident; Storify was not connecting the dots for us.
Storify is worth it if you and your organization is creating a lot of social media buzz. If there are less than 15 people that are a part of the social media conversation, you really don't need to use this tool. It's most effective as an organizational storytelling tool, so you need to find a way to get people talking about you before you implement it.
Users benefit from Dialogflow's best User Interface and seamless User Experience. It's very scalable, and there are a lot of customization options to make it even more so. Dialogflow makes it simple to deploy, manage, and maintain chatbots. Artificial Intelligence algorithms make chatbots interactive, making it easier for users and chatbots to communicate and understand each other. Overall, it's a good option for those with little programming experience who want to learn Natural Language Processing.
ManyChat is a great tool, provides loads of features, integrations and just saves you a whole load of time once all set up. If you aren't tech-savvy or used to how digital marketing tools work, it can appear complicated. That's how I felt initially 2 years ago, and after watching tutorials online I had a better understanding of it. This is why I rated it a 7, as it's not a tool that you can just play around with and guess how it works. There's definitely a learning curve with it so I recommend doing the free training and watching video tutorials.
From the day I first started using it, Storify has always made total sense. It's not the kind of product that forces you grit your teeth a lot or go into cumbersome customer support areas or fumble around forever only to be unhappy with the end result. I have been able to successfully use the product from the beginning
Dialogflow is a wonderful tool that is helping to design customized chatbots. I personally recommend if you wanna know how it's works give it a try with a free APIs call, you'll love this tool
There is room for improvement but frankly, we haven't had the need to request for support. Everything is pretty easy to setup and there are very useful video explanation guides and walkthroughs on ManyChat's YouTube channel. The only challenge we have had was to integrate it with Zapier, it's a bit tricky because you need to do a setup workaround first, but nothing too complicated.
Practice makes perfect. The more often any new tool is used, the more comfortable the implementer is with the tool. Also, there is a natural tendency with any new tool, to want to use it a great deal. Identifying proper uses as they relate to your overall marketing goals is key to any decision to use a tool.
There is always use cases for both. We still use the other plattforms but each has its own strengths and weaknesses. We, as a contact center implementation partner always use multiple solutions both for ourselves but also for our customers to meet their needs. In the cases we choose Google Cloud Dialogflow is when we need to be able to handle specific follow-up questions from the customer. And for more complicated issues we also use a combination of this and other 3rd party plattforms. We always meet the need of our customers and as specialist and consultants we give expert advice on how to use all these different solutions in the best way possible.
I've worked in the past with Chatfuel. However, I decided to switch to ManyChat due to a variety of reasons. Overall, ManyChat offers much more functionality out of the box (e.g., Facebook comments tool), sequence builders are much more intuitive. Also, they provide flexible pay as you go pricing plan, which is perfect for a startup like us.
I addressed this in an earlier comment, but Storify is truly the best that I have found for displaying things in a narrative form. Other alternatives are more visually pleasing (like Tint, RebelMouse), but don't handle the narrative form so well. Those other platforms also do not display text only social posts quite as well.
As a partner to multiple contact center plattforms we have always been able to offer Google Cloud Dialogflow along with them because it integrates well with all.
Many businesses want to implement smart ways to have call deflection. Bots that can handle full dialogues with the customer is very intriguing to them because it can fulfill customers requests without using up as many resources
For the intended application, we experienced a negative ROI due to the inconsistency in the ability to maintain the automation without incoming responses. Since it is a free service that was meant to lead to paid services organically, the inconsistencies prevented the desired outcome.
We did experience a higher conversion rate with basic incoming messages with questions about services or products due to the ability to have pre-created responses and direction immediately supporting the prospect.
My Storify stories ran the gamut of thousands of readers to a few dozen. That was on me as far as how engaging the content was/interest in the topic I came up with, probably the length of the Storify stories as well, and how much my stories were shared by others. Those reader numbers were not unique by the way, and unfortunately counted when I looked at my own story (even though I was logged in and they could tell it was me).
My objectives were to let people in on a narrative story they may have missed and to cement a passing social conversation into something more long-lasting. These Storify stories are now a part of a Tumblr blog and thus can be more easily accessed. Those aren't hard and fast numbers, but Storify helped me reach my objectives nonetheless.
As somewhat of a disclaimer, my use of Storify was not conducted for a client but as a social media experiment so I could interact with some digital transmedia storytelling. Storify was simply one piece of an integrated online persona. That being said, it was easy to track how many people had seen my Storify stories to see which were the most popular.
