How to Create Your Own Chatbot Without Coding

OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Bard, and Microsoft's Copilot are some of the most popular names in the chatbot space today. Millions of users have found ways to use these incredibly versatile chatbots in both their personal and business lives. Whether it's answering questions, offering advice, planning events, or solving business problems, these modern chatbots have a long list of important use cases.

However, as useful and powerful as these chatbots may be, you have little control over their responses and general behavior. How you use them, where you use them, and what you use them for is also limited. This makes it complicated to adapt these powerful chatbots to your unique use cases.

For instance, how do you adapt ChatGPT to help with something like customer support? How do you make it more on-brand, to suit your brand colors or voice? How can you access important data generated as your potential customers interact with the chatbot? In short, how do you make it such that these chatbots are better suited for your business needs? The answer—creating a chatbot of your own.

But creating a chatbot as versatile and powerful as the likes of Bard and ChatGPT from scratch doesn't sound like an easy task. The technical expertise and financial investment it would require is enormous. However, what if there's an easy alternative that works just as well, is just as powerful, and perhaps, even more versatile? What if you could create a chatbot like ChatGPT that you can own, personalize, and control without coding?

Sounds interesting? Well, you can create a powerful chatbot that suits your unique needs in minutes, and without the hassle of writing code or dealing with complex technicalities. But what can you gain from building your chatbot?

Benefits of Building Your Own Chatbot

There are dozens of chatbots in the market you can choose from, each having different strengths and potential benefits to your business or personal use cases. So why build your own custom chatbot? Well, here are some of the key benefits of creating your own chatbot.

1. Privacy and Security

Using popular chatbots like ChatGPT and Bard can raise understandable concerns about privacy and data security. When you provide details to these chatbots to get help solving a problem, that information is retained by the chatbot creators and could potentially be accessed or analyzed by others. This means your proprietary business data or sensitive personal information may not remain fully private or secure when using these chatbots. One way to mitigate these risks is to build your own customized chatbot. Developing an in-house chatbot gives you more control over how your data is stored, accessed, and used.

2. Use It for Business

Chatbots can immensely impact your business when deployed intelligently. From helping you make business decisions, and providing valuable business data to serving as a customer support tool, chatbots can be a game-changer in your business when used right. However, depending solely on popular chatbots like Bard for your business needs might not be a smart approach. With these external chatbots, there's little room to integrate them into your business operations. However, building your chatbot gives you the ability to design a chatbot solution with your business in mind. You can design the chatbot to align closely with your business goals, brand voice, and customer needs. An in-house chatbot can provide specific functionality like accessing your business data sources, integrating with your other systems, and scaling conversations to your requirements. It can also provide personalized and contextual responses crafted for your customers and business.

3. Customization and personalization

Perhaps one of the best perks of building your own chatbot is the enormous room for customization it offers. Building your chatbot gives you the power to create a unique chatbot experience that suits your personal taste and brand needs. With an in-house chatbot, you can get it to say what you want it to say in the way you want it to say it. This includes the tone, voice, length of responses, the language it uses, and even the personality it presents. This allows you to curate your brand image and make it more personal to your customers. This level of control and customizability enables you to design interactions that are not only efficient but also reflective of your business's unique personality.

4. Knowledgeable on Your Business

Who is an employee who knows all the ins and outs of your business? Who knows what to say when customers ask a question without being told what to say? Who can provide personalized responses to customers and address their needs quickly? Not sure? Your own chatbot is the answer! You can build a chatbot that fully understands and has deep access to your business data. The chatbot can leverage these data to respond to customer's queries and concerns in a unique and personalized way. Sure, human employees have their own set of strengths, but there’s a limit to how much information a human employee can soak up and retain about your business. Chatbots, on the other hand, have an enormous learning capacity. They can also utilize your business data to respond to customer questions at a speed and accuracy that a human employee could struggle to match.

5. Flexible Use Cases

You'll find a lot of powerful chatbots within the chatbot space, but most of them can only be accessed through their app or web URL. You can't take them out of their default platform or deploy them through other channels. Take ChatGPT for instance, by default, you can only access the chatbot on the official app or webpage. This limits their use cases and tightly restricts them to a single platform. Conversely, building your own chatbot allows you to have a chatbot that's accessible through multiple channels. You can deploy your chatbot on where you spend most of your time or where most of your customers are active. You can integrate your chatbot on your website, mobile app, and social media channels, and have it work seamlessly across all of these platforms.

Alright, so now we’ve seen the perks of building your own chatbot. But how do you actually build one? How can you create one that does all that we promised above without a ton of coding or breaking the bank? Here’s how to get your first chatbot up and running with no coding experience in just a few minutes.

How to Create and Train Your Chatbot with an Online Chatbot Maker

Once you’re ready to build your own chatbot, the first step is to choose a chatbot builder platform that meets your needs. You’ll find dozens of chatbot-building platforms out there, each one has its own unique features; strengths, and weaknesses. What will work for you depends on your unique requirements. However, for personal use and most small and medium-scale businesses, you should go for a platform that meets the following criteria:

• Uses a robust AI engine to enable natural conversations, personalization, and learning over time. Advanced AI models like GPT-3.5 or GPT-4 are ideal.
• Provides a free trial to build and test your chatbot before committing.
• Enables multi-channel deployment like website, app, and messaging platforms.
• Is affordable and transparently priced. Avoid complex or hidden costs.
• Features an intuitive, no-code interface for easy bot building.
• Allows training chatbot with your personal or business data.
• Gives you enormous control over the chatbot’s personality, branding, and responses.
• Prioritizes security and has strong privacy safeguards.
• Facilitates integration with other systems and data sources.
• Is backed by a reputable provider with expertise in enterprise AI.
  

Chatbase, an innovative AI chatbot builder, meets all these criteria! It's a robust platform that allows you to create, train, deploy, and manage your chatbot in one place. You can test your chatbot using its free trial and deploy it to your preferred platform to bring your chatbot to life! It works on your regular website and popular content management systems like WordPress, and Shopify, even on Wix websites. It is powered by OpenAI’s powerful GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 AI models, the same models that power the incredibly versatile ChatGPT AI chatbot. It is also easy to use, secure, and quite customizable. You can build and deploy a powerful chatbot for engaging with customers in just minutes. Sounds good? Here are the steps you need to build your own chatbot on Chatbase.

How to Build a Chatbot Using Chatbase

To get started, you'll need to sign up for a Chatbase account. All you need is an email and a password. Once your account has been created:

• Log into your Chatbase account and you’ll be redirected to the chatbot creator page. On the page, click on New Chatbot in the middle of the page.

• One of the perks of creating your own chatbot with Chatbase is that you get to train the chatbot with your own data. After step 1 above, you’ll see a new page where you can add the data sources for training the chatbot.
• There are several options to choose from; to train your chatbot with data from your computer, click on the file upload feature, select a file on your device, and click on Create Chatbot.

• If you want to train your chatbot from copied data on your clipboard or wish to type the training data from scratch, click on Text on the left sidebar, type or paste the text on the text area that comes up, and then click Create chatbot.  

• To use your website data for training, click on Website on the left sidebar, provide the URL of the website in the URL input field on the center of the page, and click on Fetch links. Once the process is completed, click on Create Chatbot.

• To add questions and answers manually to your chatbot, click on Q&A on the left sidebar, click on Add to show fields for questions and answers, type in the questions and answers in the respective fields, and then click on Create chatbot.

• To use data from your Notion account for training, click on Notion on the left sidebar to integrate your Notion account, and then click on Create Chatbot.

• Once you’ve selected a data source or a combination of data sources to create your chatbot, you’ll be redirected to the chatbot page where you can start chatting with your chatbot.
• Click on Settings at the top of the page to set up basic chatbot settings like providing a name for your chatbot.
• Click Embed on site to generate a script you can use to embed the chatbot on your website.

Once you've copied your embed script, add it to any page on your website that you want the chatbot to appear. You can take things a bit further by integrating the chatbot with Slack or adding it to WhatsApp to reach your customers who use the messaging app.