A conversational user interface to make building a chatbot as simple as having a conversation about it. This allows easy, free access to chatbots for thousands of small businesses, helping them engage with their customers.

This simplicity of user experience is achieved by building and tidily packaging the backend technology and user strategy into an accessible, Facebook Messenger-based interface. There are three notable systems being integrated:

1. A backend system that captures and delivers data for the full experience

1. Third party data services already in use by the business

2. Facebook Messenger, which captures data from the small business owner during setup, delivers data for consumer interactions, and captures consumer responses back into the backend system.

This all happens in the background, so business users can easily create a chatbot without technical and experience strategy expertise.

The full BotBot journey was conceived, from promotion, to chatbot template customization, to consumer interaction; then, each touchpoint and technical architecture were designed and developed. The full strategy, design, and development was implemented from January 1 through March 17, with ongoing refinements and additions of new BotBot templates.

BotBot consists of several integrated components: Facebook ads targeted at businesses, an educational website, Facebook Messenger to initially build and then interact with chatbots, Facebook ads targeted at consumers, and an analytics platform for business users. BotBot is free, requires no expertise, and the Messenger interactions are largely automated, making scale boundless.

The foremost objective of BotBot is making chatbots easily, and freely accessible to small businesses. A process that used to takes months, now takes less than three minutes. The expense has been reduced from six figures to zero figures. BotBot soft-launched on March 17 and promotion is forthcoming in mid-April, so no response rates at time of submission are yet available.

BotBot empowers small businesses to suddenly compete with enterprise-scale businesses by eliminating the financial and personnel hurdles to creating a chatbot. For consumers, they now have the flexibility to interact with more of their favorite brands on the ever-accessible Facebook Messenger.

Extensive integrations facilitate a complex exchange of data. For users – businesses building chatbots and their customers – the interface is a simple conversational exchange on Facebook Messenger, requiring no technical expertise and mere minutes to build or use.

BotBot offers chatbot functionality tailored by vertical, then makes the process of building and deploying a bot extremely accessible. As each new template comes online, the associated vertical is targeted with sponsored ads.

Hundreds of thousands of business Facebook pages were identified that could be offering a richer experience with chatbots on Messenger. BotBot is targeted at these small businesses and their customers who are already interacting on Facebook.

BotBot turns the process of building a chatbot into a simple conversation, thus eliminating expertise and cost of setup, and making them accessible to anyone. For business users, promotion drives to the BotBot educational site, which guides template selection for customization in Facebook Messenger. Consumers are targeted by businesses with chatbots to announce their newly offered experience.

Chatbots allow companies to improve customer service and increase sales. But, however simple they appear, building chatbots requires considerable creative and technical expertise, time, and money. These restraints make chatbots inaccessible to most small businesses.

BotBot enables small businesses to build chatbots in minutes, not months, without assistance, following these easy steps. First, utilize Facebook Messenger to build a chatbot experience, satisfying common consumer interactions like ordering food, asking common questions of a business, and booking fitness classes. Second, serve the chatbot experience on Messenger, so consumers have easy access to these high utility interactions.

In this manner, BotBot makes chatbots accessible to all small businesses, not just enterprises with the extensive resources required to build one from scratch. BotBot was built on a budget of $400K. The experience itself is free, requires no expertise, and the Messenger interactions are largely automated, making scale boundless.