Chatbot – Comparison of platforms
With everyone raging to adopt chatbots in different use cases to aid better customer experience, one of the challenge from a technology is which framework to build the chatbot on? Ofcourse custom and building from scratch is always an option however it would help if the process of development could be bootstrapped with the help of a platform or a framework that comes with pre-built features. Here is my take on the various chatbot platforms that are available and I will try to keep as much as updated as possible.
| Dimensions | Amazon Lex | Google DialogFlow | IBM Watson | Microsoft LUIS |
| Ease of Use | Uses speech language support similar to NLU | Create rich custom UI and communicate using RESTful services via webhooks
Can be mixed with angular frontend and that provides flexibility |
Complex given it has to fit within the IBM stack of products/suites and standards. No single API and no service to manage the conversation | Deployment as HTTP endpoints and ability to converse as JSON is super helpful.
Natural language support is good similar to the one in powerbi |
| Voice | Integration with Alexa is good
Ability to use skillsets from Alexa and mange is super helpful. |
Google Assistant / Home – not as good as alexa | Blends with Alexa skills | Lacks voice capabilities and is not as good as its peers |
| Documentation | Basic | Basic | Basic | Basic |
| Validation | Lambda integration helps | Cannot block matches to context from intent | Comes with very minimal validation
Has personality insights which is kinda cool |
Has minimal validation functions |
| Prebuilt | AWS interoperability and ability to scale with EC2 instances | Has prebuilt entities similar to LUIS | Prebuilt models | Entities such as location, money, age, date-time |
| Pricing | $.004 for voice
$$0.00075 for text |
$0.0065 per 15 second
$0.002 per request The highest price in this category |
0.0025 for text | $0.00075 for text |
| Platform Integration Support | Facebook, Slack, Twilio
No messenger support |
Microsoft Cortana, Facebook Messenger, Skype, Slack, Telegram, Amazon Alexa, Twitter, Kik, Line, Cisco Spark, Cisco Tropo, Twilio and Twilio IP
Please note it can talk with Alexa |
Openwhisk, salesforce, swift, unity | Facebook, Slack, Twilio, Email, Bing, Cortana to mention a few
Messenger and Skype support is helpful Integrates with Dynamics CRM |
| Language Support | English | English, French, Dutch, Russian, Ukranian, Italian, German, Spanish, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese,Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Portuguese, Japanese | English, Japanese | English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and Chinese |
| Programming | Java, JavaScript, Python, CLI, .NET, Ruby on Rails, PHP, Go, and CPP. | Android, iOS, Cordova, HTML, JavaScript, Node.js, C#.NET, Unity, Xamarian, C++, Python, Ruby, Java, Espon Moverio, Botkit and PHP | Node SDK, Java SDK, Python SDK, iOS SDK, Unity SDK | C# SDK, Python SDK, Node JS SDK, Android SDK |