Lessons learned from building a chatbot platform for 2 years

I've been working on Presbot for over 2+ years now. It started as a self-learning chatbot designed to act as an interactive agent that would represent its owner in all sorts of situations. I realized that until that interaction is smooth and believable - not passing a Turing test, but closer to an actual dynamic conversation, it provides much less value, more slowly. Also, users don't like to enter a ton of information upfront or train the chatbot, which requires the onboarding process to be as simple and straightforward as possible. Most of the chatbot responses initially were reliant on scanning profile text and incoherent user input which did not result in a great user experience.

Interestingly, a large portion of the users perceived the chatbot as a general-purpose AI agent capable of responding effectively to random questions (for example., - Cheap flights to New York - How far is the moon from earth? - Who was the Nth president of the United States? - What’s the meaning of love? - What’s Baby Yoda's real name?

Believe it or not, these were some of the popular questions. Presbot was able to respond with vague "I'm not sure" type responses at best. At one point, I added top N results from Wikipedia in the response to at least point users in the right direction but ended up removing it eventually. Let me know if you’d like more of the questions and I'll be happy to share)

I ended up pivoting to a rule-based bot focusing on lead capture via a conversation curated with dynamic questions. I added an option to offer a service (e.g., newsletter signup) in exchange for users' email and the ability to retarget with a deeper discount or a more engaging value proposition if the initial offer did not go through, and updated my value proposition to lead generation vs it being a self-learning chatbot.

I am reaching out for feedback and, in appreciation for your time, would love to offer a limited-time 50% off on all paid plans (Use Code HALFOFF at Checkout). The app has a free tier as well which should suffice for the most part. Thank you!!

http://presbot.com/