Chatbots are a hot topic right now. With the meteoric rise of artificial intelligence (AI), chatbots have become one of the most popular ways for customers to interact with businesses' websites and apps.

And for good reason — AI-powered chatbots offer a more natural, human-like experience than rules-based ones, which can lead to better customer satisfaction and increased sales.

But not all AI chatbots are created equal. Some are better than others at understanding user intent, responding in a natural way and providing a positive customer experience.

So how do you know which one is best for your business? Read on!

How Do AI Chatbots work?

AI chatbots are computer programs that are designed to emulate natural human conversation. They are commonly used in customer service to provide answers to common questions and to resolve simple problems.

They work by extracting small pieces of information from a user's chat input, understanding the intent and sentiment of the user's query and providing a meaningful response.

There are two main types of AI technologies that are commonly used in chatbots: rule-based systems and machine learning (ML) systems.

Rule-based systems follow a set of predefined rules in order to generate a response, while ML systems use training techniques to learn from previous interactions in order to better understand user intent and sentiment.

ML-based chatbots are generally considered to be more effective than rule-based ones, as they are able to learn from past responses.

What Are the Best AI Chatbots in the Market?

1. Intercom

Intercom is a messaging platform that helps businesses speed up the resolution of customer issues, qualify leads and grow their pipeline with the use of custom bots.

Custom bots collect upfront information from customers, making support quicker and a lot more efficient than email and trouble-ticket systems, saving your support team time and energy.

You can create brand new Intercom custom bots in a matter of minutes, using advanced targeting and enrichment to start conversations with your customers or leads.

Its custom bots are easy to use and require no programming knowledge.

Intercom Features that Stand Out

• Faster problem-solving: Intercom's custom bots automatically prioritize and route new conversations for more efficient customer support
  
• Code-free customization: can connect to your tech stack, automate workflows behind the scenes and act as an integrated extension of your sales and support teams
  
• More leads: always on duty, starting conversations, asking questions and delivering qualified leads 24/7/365
  
• Triage conversations automatically: collect upfront info from customers, making support much quicker and more efficient than more traditional tools like email and trouble-ticket platforms
  
• Proactively engage qualified leads: start conversations by using advanced lead targeting and enrichment, and only engage the leads you instruct it to
  
• Immediacy: you can use a chatbot in lieu of a web form to engage high-intent leads in real time and then switch them over to a conversation with a live rep to convert faster
  

2. Zendesk

Zendesk's chatbot, Answer Bot, works alongside your support team to help answer customers' queries through the use of artificial intelligence.

This AI chatbot can answer common questions and identify when to bring in a live agent whether they're logged on or off, helping you manage and prioritize your customer requests efficiently.

If you're looking for a cost-effective way to improve your customer service at scale, this chatbot is a great complement to the market-leading Zendesk live chat solution.

Zendesk Features that Stand Out

• Reduce repetitive work: protect your agents' time and let the Answer Bot collect customer information like name, email, issue type, etc.
  
• Fill in the gaps: map and pre-populate important information from your customers' records into existing ticket fields
• Give agents context: always stores the transcript of each conversation, allowing your team to jump right into troubleshooting without having the customer repeat themselves
• Design your bot's conversation flow: Flow Builder allows you to orchestrate the conversation between Answer Bot and your customers. Once you build a flow, you can publish it in multiple languages without writing a single line of code
• Present in many places: you can install Answer Bot on multiple support channels like chat, messaging, email, Slack, and more. This gives you an opportunity to support more customers, eliminate wait times, and improve customer satisfaction
  
• Integrate your own bot: connect any third-party bot to Zendesk

3. Instabot

Instabot is an AI chatbot that can help you increase conversions. It understands your users and can provide them with curated information, answer questions, capture contacts and book meetings in real time.

This bot is very easy to incorporate into an existing workflow. You can build, integrate and launch Instabot on your website or as a landing page in under 20 minutes.

Instabot leverages the latest AI technology to generate smart, customized conversations that can help you connect with your customers at a deeper level making your support reps a lot more efficient.

You can also port data collected by the chatbot over to your CRM, marketing automation, email platforms or other internal portals to help increase conversions in your marketing pipeline.

Instabot Features that Stand Out

• Set goals throughout the bot: qualify leads, receive alerts and create segments based on users that reach important conversational milestones
• Book meetings directly in the bot: save time and eliminate time-consuming scheduling back and forth. Also empower website visitors to set up a call or demo right away
• Integration with Google Calendar and Office 365: use the same calendar platform you’re already using, easily integrating into your current business workflow
• Book a meeting link: allow prospects to book a meeting straight from your email signature or link your calendar to newsletters, digital ads, etc.
• Analyze popular bot flows: identify where your users are most engaged or drop-off within your conversation so you can optimize
• Set and track your goals: analyze which bots are most successful in capturing leads, responding to user requests, or any other KPI you're measuring
  
• Self-learning: train your bots to get smarter based on your users' interactions. The more your users engage with the system, the better your bot will respond over time
  
• Live chat with users: when your users hit a snag or need to help from a real rep, Instabot allows your reps to take over the conversation and begin chatting directly
  

4. Drift

Best AI Chatbot for Appointment Scheduling

Drift is a customer engagement platform that helps businesses qualify customer interest, share content and schedule a meeting with your sales team.

Its AI chatbots are specifically tailored to each visitor, providing a unique and customized experience that can help you close deals faster.

With Drift, you can unlock your pipeline with the right conversation for every situation, deliver more qualified meetings for your sales team, increase the return on your marketing investment and engage your target visitors with customized messages.

Drift Features that Stand Out

• Unlock your pipeline: accelerate qualification through customized conversations
• Deliver more qualified meetings: offer and schedule a meeting with sales. Your team gets qualified meetings and can focus on the deal instead of wrestling with scheduling back and forth
  
• Increase your return on investment: turn bot visitors into qualified leads by engaging, qualifying and setting sales meetings with them
  
• Engage your visitors with the right message: with Drift’s A/B Testing capability, you can test different bot playbook messages, see which message is performing the best and use this data to optimize your playbook content to convert more visitors into qualified leads
  

5. LivePerson

Best AI Chatbot for Qualifying Customer Sentiment

LivePerson is a chat solution for businesses that want to improve their customer relations at scale through AI-powered chatbots that communicate in a more human-sounding way.

By uniting your customer experience platforms across messaging, social media, voice calls, email, sentiments analysis, and analytics, LivePerson can help you build stronger customer relationships.

LivePerson Features that Stand Out

• AI and automation: accelerate your time to market with natural language understanding (NLU) intent models and automations that don’t require any coding
  
• Customer sentiment: quantify your customer relationships to understand how people feel about your brand over time using LivePerson's sentiment analytics
  
• Reporting: respond to trends in the marketplace and benchmark against other brands in your vertical with out-of-the-box analytics
  
• Agent and supervisor experience: give agents the power to quickly find answers and keep conversations on track, while giving supervisors the 360-degree view they needed to coach agents
  
• Customer journey: connect contextual data with consumer intent to engage with the right consumer at the right time with a personalized buyer experience
  

6. Landbot

Best Codeless AI Chatbot

Landbot is a powerful AI chatbot builder that doesn't require any coding skills. With it, you can easily create and manage chatbots that convert leads, capture data and personalize client journeys in real-time.

You can engage your audience naturally through human-like conversations and use its drag-and-drop creator to build advanced conversational flows that allow you to create custom AI chatbots for any purpose.

Landbot Features that Stand Out

• Code-Free Drag-and-Drop Interface: offers an intuitive interface that's easy to navigate and use regardless of your technical skills, allowing you to design functional bots in minutes
  
• Rich Media Integration: provides a simple way to integrate videos, gifs and images inside the conversation flow
  
• Templates: pre-built templates provide a lot of flexibility, allowing you to launch bots in minutes for lead generation, product launch, event registration, job application, etc.
  
• Customized Journeys with Keyword Jump: personalize the customer dialog using keywords as jump triggers that send users down the conversation path that's relevant to them
  
• Human Takeover & Chat Manager: arrange for a seamless bot-to-human handoff and let your team take over using Landbot's chat manager, taking advantage of all user data and access to past conversations
  
• Multi-Questions: enrich your bots with graphic UI elements like the multi-questions block that allows you to create smart "mini-forms" inside the conversation
  
• Multi-Channel Experiences: use Landbot's API to take customers from a bot conversation directly to external textual communications platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, etc.
  

7. Mindsay

Best AI Chatbot for Complex Customer Requests

Mindsay's no-code conversational AI platform allows you to create and manage customer interactions using NLP and machine learning, reducing customer support wait times by 99%.

Its AI chatbot can handle thousands of use cases including complex requests across many channels, from messaging applications to social media.

By allowing you to automate up to 80% of all support requests, Mindsay simplifies and streamlines customer interactions so you can focus on service delivery and speed up issue resolution.

Mindsay Features that Stand Out

• Self-learning tech: the NLP technology behind Mindsay’s conversational AI has been trained using millions of conversations, allowing you to deal with a large number of customer support use cases
  
• Simplify your support: cut down the number of support requests getting through to your agents by up to 80%
  
• Make life easier for your agents: automatically qualify and route customers to an agent with all the information that's needed at their fingertips
  
• Make checkouts faster: reduce friction in your customer’s shopping experience across a wide variety of channels with Mindsay's online shopping bot
  
• Take personalization to the next level: Mindsay’s shopping bot will ask shoppers what they’re trying to find and make personalized purchase recommendations based on their preferences
  
• Be where your customers are: engage customers on their favorite communication channels. Mindsay’s chatbots can be added to your website, WhatsApp, SMS and many other channels
  

8. Ada

Best AI Chatbot for 24/7 Customer Support

Ada provides a personalized customer experience across multiple channels, including voice, chat, and messaging.

Using advanced AI, Ada understands what customers want and integrates all systems to support them across multiple digital channels, not just chat.

Ada Features that Stand Out

• Instant support: help customers 24/7 across mobile, digital, and social channels without having to extend customer support hours or add new agents
  
• Personalize the customer experience: customize every interaction to strengthen brand loyalty. Ada’s automation platform acts on each customer's information, intent, and interests with tailored answers, proactive discounts, and relevant recommendations in over 100 languages
  
• Put customer support agents back in charge: frees agents from repetitive customer support tasks so they can focus on resolving high-value inquiries that require a human touch
  
• NLP: recognizes common speech patterns and can respond quickly and accurately
  
• Easy integrations: one-click, out-of-the-box integrations with tools across marketing, sales and customer experience
  

9. Genesys

Best AI Chatbot for Omnichannel Marketing

The Genesys Chatbot provides organizations with the ability to deploy industry-leading AI to personalize omnichannel customer journeys at scale.

The chatbot is designed to help you automate your voice conversations and deliver faster responses to customer inquiries.

Using AI, Genesys lets you build not only chatbots but also voicebots with natural language understanding (NLU) that are capable of interpreting a customer's engagement history across channels, enabling them to quickly find answers to their questions.

Genesys Features that Stand Out

• Enhanced first-contact resolution: multiple customers asking the same questions don’t always get a consistent level of service from live agents, but chatbots can deliver the correct answer every time
• Context-driven interactions: add context to customer experiences by adding field-level validation and connecting with existing back-end or third-party systems to deliver more personalized experiences
• Natural language understanding: automate interactions using natural language understanding (NLU), which enables AI to understand common chat vernacular
• Intuitive visual flow builder: create smart bots using an intuitive drag-and-drop flow builder that comes equipped with built-in dialog management and natural language processing (NLP) features
• Omnichannel deployment: enable customers to self-serve wherever they prefer to engage with your brand. Build and customize conversational AI bots and deploy them across all your voice and digital channels
• Supervised learning: improve customer experiences over time with advanced machine learning. Bots continuously learn with human-in-the-loop monitoring and automatically labeled live customer data
  

10. ManyChat

Best AI Chatbot Purpose Built for Facebook, Instagram and SMS Direct Messaging

ManyChat can help you automate communications with your customers and deliver instant support through personalized conversations via Instagram Direct Messages and Facebook Messenger.

By using ManyChat, you can increase product sales, customer engagement, generate qualified leads and deliver instant support through personalized conversations.

Additionally, it enables you to deliver coupons, newsletters, promotions, booking confirmations and more, through either SMS or email.

ManyChat Features that Stand Out

• Facebook Ads: combine ManyChat with your Facebook Ads campaigns and reduce acquisition costs. Use Click-to-Messenger Ads to send prospects into Messenger, where you can qualify leads, accept payments and keep the conversation going
  
• Turn Comments into sales: automatically respond to comments on your Facebook posts with the Comments Growth Tool. Answer common questions, offer product recommendations, initiate newsletter sign-ups and more
  
• Customer Links: use ManyChat’s Messenger URL Growth Tool to create a messenger link for your chatbot that customers can access from their preferred channel, e.g. website, email, text message, etc.
  
• Drag, Drop and Connect: with ManyChat’s easy-to-use tools, customize your customer conversations with no coding required
  
• Save Time with Integrations: easily connect to your eCommerce tool with direct integrations to Shopify, PayPal, Stripe, ActiveCampaign, Google Sheets, and 1,500+ additional apps through Zapier and Integromat
  

11. Rulai

Best AI Chatbot for Multi-Round Conversations

Rulai is a no-code chatbot platform provider that solves the three most important friction points of any virtual assistant deployment:

• Automating all conversations
• Delivering a consistently great experience across the entire customer journey
• Deploying bots quickly and cost-effectively

Rulai’s virtual assistants don’t get tripped when talking with customers. Its level-3 AI dialog manager can be used to build multi-round conversations in real-time without writing any code.

Rulai Features that Stand Out

• Smart AI: Rulai’s virtual assistants never get confused when talking with customers due to its level-3 AI dialog manager
  
• Action Oriented: through hundreds of built-in integrations and a powerful Javascript engine, Rulai’s Robotics Process Automatic (RPA) engine can automate workflows and create conversational dialogues with ease while connecting to your enterprise systems or RPA platforms
  
• High speed: it automatically identifies use cases, generates training data, acquires knowledge, streamlines workflows and detects issues. Combined with their no-code design studio, you can launch bots and make changes in minutes
  
• Seamless integration: Rulai-powered bots integrate seamlessly with voice and text-based apps, contact centers, agent desktops, backend fulfillment systems and even third-party bots
  

12. Inbenta

Best AI Chatbot for CRM Integration

Inbenta's AI platform is designed to help you build seamless customer interactions. Its easy-to-build chatbot can be used to reduce handling costs and boost digital self-service, increasing conversions and engagement rates across all channels.

Its chatbot is equipped with natural language processing (NLP), which helps to better understand the users, detect their intent and analyze their sentiment.

In addition, Inbenta's chatbot integrates with third-party platforms like CRM, ERP and HRMS like Saleforce, Shopify, Slack and many others, allowing you to experience increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Inbenta Features that Stand Out

• Provide customers with relevant answers 24/7: use NLP to better understand your users, detect their intent, and analyze their sentiment in order to return the most appropriate answer
  
• Facilitate your customers' tasks: benefit from RPA to manage transactions like bookings, meetings and order modifications
  
• Customize your customers' journey: add variables using native integrations with third-party platforms like CRMs, ERPs and HRMS's
  
• Escalate complex requests to your agents: keep conversation history and escalate user requests to Inbenta's live chat and ticketing module for a seamless experience
  
• Be reachable everywhere: answer your customers' requests on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Slack, etc.
  
• Single tool to process requests: turn your incoming contacts into tickets no matter where they come from, be it email, social networks or Inbenta’s chatbot
  
• Improve customer satisfaction: offer your customers pre-approved responses, automatic real-time query analysis and relevant answer recommendations
  

13. Vergic

Best AI Chatbot for Phone Integration

Vergic's chatbot offers customers a more personal and engaging digital experience, improving revenue and customer experience in all digital channels by acting on customer behavior, value and journey.

By integrating Vergic's chatbot with AI or BOT services, you can provide your customers with a virtual agent that can respond to all their needs in real-time.

It also allows you to communicate with your customers through Facebook Messenger, Skype, Slack, and other leading IM apps, as well as offering webcall, callback, or phone options for handling customer interactions.

Vergic Features that Stand Out

• Capture leads 24/7: never miss out on a lead again. Gather contacts and schedule meetings at all times of the day
  
• Build you own bots: use drag and drop to create and train your chatbots using Vergic's Bot Trainer
• Work with live agents: transfer your customers to a live agent when needed. Pre-prep live dialogs to save resources
  
• Guide your customers: let the bot co-browse your website with the customer to take advantage of existing content and web services
  
• Multilingual AI Intent: advanced cognitive services can be trained in your area of expertise in multiple languages
  
• Rule-based engagement: contextual starting points in dialogs based on visitor segmenting
  

14. Acquire

Best AI Chatbot for Custom Workflows

Acquire is an AI chatbot software tool that enables human-like interactions in your customer support channel, allowing you to hand over routine work and FAQs to the bot so your team can focus on more strategic tasks.

You can choose your bot's purpose and build custom workflows in minutes. And if your bots get stuck in a specific use case, they'll automatically route questions to a human customer service agent.

Acquire Features that Stand Out

• Free up live customer support time: configure your bots to automatically take care of basic questions like, "What's your price?" and "How do I reset my password?"
  
• Seamlessly connect bots to other tools: build your own chatbots within Acquire, or integrate with popular business chatbot software like IBM Watson, Dialogflow and Azure QnA. Connect bots to third-party apps using webhooks and Acquire's open API
  
• Knowledge base software: enable customers to self-serve by giving them access to your knowledge base content through Acquire Chatbots
  
• No coding required: create customer service chatbots without any coding knowledge
  
• Optimize chatbot performance: learn which chatbots your customers find the most engaging and tweak the ones that need a little performance improvement
  

15. Watson Assistant

Best AI Chatbot for NLP Implementation

Watson Assistant is an AI-powered virtual agent that helps customers get things done quickly, easily and on any channel.

It uses AI that understands customers in context to provide fast, consistent and accurate answers across any application, device or channel.

Watson Assistant's natural language processing (NLP) capabilities help improve the user experience on the channels they use most, by making it easier to recognize topics and content.

Watson Assistant Features that Stand Out

• Recognizes plain-language responses: entity detection models can recognize plain-language responses from your customers like synonyms, dates, times, numbers and more
• Adapts to your domain: deep learning models automatically adapt to your business' domain based on the sentences you provide as training data
• Understands any request: NLP can be trained to understand a new topic in any language with only a handful of sample sentences
• Clarification: Watson Assistant automatically clarifies vague requests and uses your customers' selections to improve its understanding going forward
• Webchat: embed the AI assistant as a webchat widget on your website
  
• Preview actions the way a customer does: as you build, you can preview the conversation as your users will experience. You can also use advanced debugging capabilities to fix problems quickly
  

What are the benefits of using an AI chatbot?

AI-powered chatbots can offer a number of benefits for businesses, including increased engagement, off-hours availability, and improved customer service.

When it comes to customer engagement, chatbots can help create a more personalized experience by recalling details about previous interactions and providing relevant recommendations.

24/7/365 availability is another key benefit of AI chatbots. By being available round-the-clock, they can help to improve customer satisfaction by ensuring that common queries are dealt with quickly and efficiently at any time of the day.

Thanks to their sophisticated understanding of human conversation, including intent and sentiment, AI chatbots can deal with a wide range of typical customer queries before live support is required.

What are the different types of AI chatbot?

There are 3 general types of chatbots:

Rule-based: These bots are programmed with a set of rules that determine how they will respond to specific questions or commands.

AI-powered: These bots use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to understand natural language and can use historical records to respond in a way that can be tailored to each individual customer.

Hybrid: A hybrid chatbot combines the features of both rule-based and AI-powered chatbots. It can be programmed with specific rules, but also uses AI to understand natural language input and can generate more personalized responses while also answering common repetitive questions.

What to Do Next

Chatbots are a great way to provide a more personalized customer experience, improve customer service and increase customer engagement. They can also help your customer support team save time and money by automating simple tasks.

The best way to appreciate the capabilities of AI chatbots is to try them out for a fit. Most of the above tools offer either free trials or a money back guarantee.

I recommend that you try Intercom first (the editor's choice) since while it's beginner-friendly it has a lot of customization options.

They offer a 14-day free trial with their entry-level plan so you can assess if it's well suited to your needs before you commit to a full-featured plan.