Best Practices and Strategies on how to gain a suitable Chatbot Data Collection

Author

Robert Koch

I write about AI, SEO, Tech, and Innovation. Led by curiosity, I stay ahead of AI advancements. I aim for clarity and understand the necessity of change, taking guidance from Shaw: 'Progress is impossible without change,' and living by Welch's words: 'Change before you have to'.

Chatbots are now an integral part of companies’ customer support services. They can offer speedy services around the clock without any human dependence. But, many companies still don’t have a proper understanding of what they need to get their chat solution up and running.

In other words, getting your chatbot solution off the ground requires adding data. You need to input data that will allow the chatbot to understand the questions and queries that customers ask properly. And that is a common misunderstanding that you can find among various companies.

Many businesses might have many “data” to include in the chatbots as answers. But, most don’t have the essential data to train their chatbot: examples of how people will express their intentions. Nevertheless, it all comes down to one question: what are the best Chatbot data collection strategies?

This article will give you a comprehensive idea about the data collection strategies you can use for your chatbots. But before that, let’s understand the purpose of chatbots and why you need training data for it.

Table of Contents

• What Is the Purpose and the benefit of a Chatbot?

• What is Chatbot Training Data?

• Key Phrases to Know About for Chatbot Training

• The Importance of Appropriate Training Data for the Development of a Successful Chatbot

• What Are the Best Data Collection Strategies for the Chatbots?

• What is The Most Effective Method to Use for Data Collection?

• What Do You Need to Consider When Collecting Data for Your Chatbot Design & Development?

• Chatbot Training Basics: Here is what you need to Know

• Final Thoughts

What Is the Purpose and the benefit of a Chatbot?

A chatbot is a software or computer program that communicates and interacts with humans using natural language. Companies can use it for various purposes, such as customer support, marketing, etc. The best thing about chatbots is that it streamlines the communication process for companies.

They are exceptional tools for businesses to convert data and customize suggestions into actionable insights for their potential customers. The main reason chatbots are witnessing rapid growth in their popularity today is due to their 24/7 availability.

Customers can get instant services at any time of the day. Companies can now effectively reach their potential audience and streamline their customer support process. Moreover, they can also provide quick responses, reducing the users’ waiting time.

Tip:

Want to learn more about chatbots? Then read our glossary article:

All about chatbots

Why Is Data Collection Important for Creating Chatbots Today?

While chatbot offers great benefits for your business, creating one can take time and effort. It requires you to have a proper plan for data collection and analysis endeavors. You can choose a wide range of ways to collect data for your chatbot, such as:

• Dialogues with humans
• Surveys or focus groups on the topic of interest
• User testing with different variations of the interface design/chatbot personality

However, these methods are futile if they don’t help you find accurate data for your chatbot. Customers won’t get quick responses and chatbots won’t be able to provide accurate answers to their queries. Therefore, data collection strategies play a massive role in helping you create relevant chatbots.

What is Chatbot Training Data?

When creating a chatbot, the first and most important thing is to train it to address the customer’s queries by adding relevant data. It is an essential component for developing a chatbot since it will help you understand this computer program to understand the human language and respond to user queries accordingly.

They are relevant sources such as chat logs, email archives, and website content to find chatbot training data. With this data, chatbots will be able to resolve user requests effectively. You will need to source data from existing databases or proprietary resources to create a good training dataset for your chatbot.

Tip:

At clickworker, we provide you with suitable training data according to your requirements for your chatbot.

Voice Datasets

Key Phrases to Know About for Chatbot Training

You need to know about certain phases before moving on to the chatbot training part. These key phrases will help you better understand the data collection process for your chatbot project.

• Utterances

The first word that you would encounter when training a chatbot is utterances. It refers to the things that the user might say to your bot.

• Intent

The next term is intent, which represents the meaning of the user’s utterance. Simply put, it tells you about the intentions of the utterance that the user wants to get from the AI chatbot.

• Entity

Lastly, you’ll come across the term entity which refers to the keyword that will clarify the user’s intent.

The Importance of Appropriate Training Data for the Development of a Successful Chatbot

Data collection holds significant importance in the development of a successful chatbot. It will allow your chatbots to function properly and ensure that you add all the relevant preferences and interests of the users.

Moreover, data collection will also play a critical role in helping you with the improvements you should make in the initial phases. This way, you’ll ensure that the chatbots are regularly updated to adapt to customers’ changing needs.

What Are the Best Data Collection Strategies for the Chatbots?

One thing to note is that your chatbot can only be as good as your data and how well you train it. Therefore, data collection is an integral part of chatbot development. Let’s go over them in more detail.

• Use Data Logs That Are Already Available

The best way to collect data for chatbot development is to use chatbot logs that you already have. The best thing about taking data from existing chatbot logs is that they contain the relevant and best possible utterances for customer queries. Moreover, this method is also useful for migrating a chatbot solution to a new classifier.

You can also use this method for continuous improvement since it will ensure that the chatbot solution’s training data is effective and can deal with the most current requirements of the target audience. However, one challenge for this method is that you need existing chatbot logs.

• Use Human-To-Human Chat Logs for Data Collection

Another great way to collect data for your chatbot development is through mining words and utterances from your existing human-to-human chat logs. You can search for the relevant representative utterances to provide quick responses to the customer’s queries.

One of the pros of using this method is that it contains good representative utterances that can be useful for building a new classifier. Just like the chatbot data logs, you need to have existing human-to-human chat logs.

• Use the Watson Assistant Content Catalog to Include Relevant Examples

The Watson Assistant allows you to create conversational interfaces, including chatbots for your app, devices, or other platforms. You can add the natural language interface to automate and provide quick responses to the target audiences.

The Watson Assistant content catalog allows you to get relevant examples that you can instantly deploy. You can find several domains using it, such as customer care, mortgage, banking, chatbot control, etc. While this method is useful for building a new classifier, you might not find too many examples for complex use cases or specialized domains.

• Create Your Training Examples

Finally, you can also create your own data training examples for chatbot development. You can use it for creating a prototype or proof-of-concept since it is relevant fast and requires the last effort and resources.

However, the downside of this data collection method for chatbot development is that it will lead to partial training data that will not represent runtime inputs. You will need a fast-follow MVP release approach if you plan to use your training data set for the chatbot project.

What is The Most Effective Method to Use for Data Collection?

While there are many ways to collect data, you might wonder which is the best. Ideally, combining the first two methods mentioned in the above section is best to collect data for chatbot development. This way, you can ensure that the data you use for the chatbot development is accurate and up-to-date.

Moreover, you can also get a complete picture of how your users interact with your chatbot. Using data logs that are already available or human-to-human chat logs will give you better projections about how the chatbots will perform after you launch them.

Furthermore, you can also identify the common areas or topics that most users might ask about. This way, you can invest your efforts into those areas that will provide the most business value. But, if you want, you can also go with other options.

If you choose to go with the other options for the data collection for your chatbot development, make sure you have an appropriate plan. Not having a plan will lead to unpredictable or poor performance. At the end of the day, your chatbot will only provide the business value you expected if it knows how to deal with real-world users.

What Do You Need to Consider When Collecting Data for Your Chatbot Design & Development?

The chatbots receive data inputs to provide relevant answers or responses to the users. Therefore, the data you use should consist of users asking questions or making requests.

It will help this computer program understand requests or the question’s intent, even if the user uses different words. That is what AI and machine learning are all about, and they highly depend on the data collection process. Therefore, you need to consider the following few things.

When inputting utterances or other data into the chatbot development, you need to use the vocabulary or phrases your customers are using. Taking advice from developers, executives, or subject matter experts won’t give you the same queries your customers ask about the chatbots.

Most small and medium enterprises in the data collection process might have developers and others working on their chatbot development projects. However, they might include terminologies or words that the end user might not use.

As a result, they can submit questions or queries that don’t include the background and real-world circumstances in the chatbot solution. It can impact the overall user experience since the chatbot can’t comprehend the user’s queries or questions.

Chatbot Training Basics: Here is what you need to Know

Chatbot training is about finding out what the users will ask from your computer program. So, you must train the chatbot so it can understand the customers’ utterances. To help you out, here is a list of a few tips that you can use.

• Have a Clear Set of Use Cases for Your Chatbot

The first thing you need to do is clearly define the specific problems that your chatbots will resolve. While you might have a long list of problems that you want the chatbot to resolve, you need to shortlist them to identify the critical ones. This way, your chatbot will deliver value to the business and increase efficiency.

• Keep Your Intents Unique

If the chatbot doesn’t understand what the user is asking from them, it can severely impact their overall experience. Therefore, you need to learn and create specific intents that will help serve the purpose.

• Build a Team for the Chatbot Training Process

It is best to have a diverse team for the chatbot training process. This way, you will ensure that the chatbot is ready for all the potential possibilities. However, the goal should be to ask questions from a customer’s perspective so that the chatbot can comprehend and provide relevant answers to the users.

• Focus on Other Things Apart from the Text

It will be more engaging if your chatbots use different media elements to respond to the users’ queries. Therefore, you can program your chatbot to add interactive components, such as cards, buttons, etc., to offer more compelling experiences. Moreover, you can also add CTAs (calls to action) or product suggestions to make it easy for the customers to buy certain products.

• Focus on Continuous Improvement

Once you deploy the chatbot, remember that the job is only half complete. You would still have to work on relevant development that will allow you to improve the overall user experience.

Final Thoughts

We hope you now have a clear idea of the best data collection strategies and practices. Remember that the chatbot training data plays a critical role in the overall development of this computer program. The correct data will allow the chatbots to understand human language and respond in a way that is helpful to the user.

Also, choosing relevant sources of information is important for training purposes. It would be best to look for client chat logs, email archives, website content, and other relevant data that will enable chatbots to resolve user requests effectively.

If you want to keep the process simple and smooth, then it is best to plan and set reasonable goals. Also, make sure the interface design doesn’t get too complicated. Think about the information you want to collect before designing your bot.

Lastly, organize everything to keep a check on the overall chatbot development process to see how much work is left. It will help you stay organized and ensure you complete all your tasks on time.