8 Best Free Resources for Chatbot Development
Want to learn chatbot development and advance your career?
Here’s a little warning: You need to read. A lot!
After all, keeping up with the fast-paced digital marketing means being able to not just go with the flow, but being able to adapt to the changes and apply it to your business’ marketing strategies.
So if you’ve decided to step up your digital marketing level to the next level and want to self-study chatbot development, I’ve come up with a list of the best resources and channels to learn chatbot development for free.
Here are the 8 best resources for free chatbot development.
One of the best ways to get your brand noticed and stand out in the crowd is utilizing the use of a free chatbot platform.
Chatbots are AI (artificial intelligence) platforms that your users interact with through messages or voice interface. Interactions can be as simple as asking about today’s weather or more complex like asking its assistance to troubleshoot a problem with purchasing a product or services.
You can use chatbots to simulate conversations with your users through your website or mobile applications. These chatbots can be deployed for customer support, sales, and other services that would help you streamline your business’ process.
Getting started with chatbots is not as complicated or difficult as it may seem. In fact, there were 300,000 chatbots of Facebook alone and those have been used by millions of users in around 200 countries across the globe, this is according to a report from Hootsuite.
Your goal should be to create a chatbot that is entertaining, helpful, and useful to your users and customers.
Now, let’s further explore the list of the best resources for free chatbot development.
1. Chatbot University
MobileMonkey is a Facebook Messenger marketing platform that makes it easy to build chatbots and execute marketing automations. This is the company I made in 2017 after seeing an opportunity on how customer communication through Facebook marketing messenger chatbots is 10x more engaging compared to sending regular emails.
MobileMonkey’s Chatbot University offers free chatbot tutorials, tools, and resources. You can choose to learn the basics of making chatbots, or simply “Chatbot 101.” There are also tutorials for chatbots by industry and use case, Facebook Messenger marketing, advanced chatbot marketing, chatbot training course, and agencies’ guide to a chatbot.
Here is a complete list of free chatbot tutorials from MobileMonkey:
Apart from Chatbot University. MobileMonkey also has a dedicated Youtube channel called Chatbot Marketing Webinars which features numerous learning videos about chatbot development.
2. Botwiki
Botwiki was created by Stefan Bohacek in July 2015. His goal is to preserve examples of creative and interesting online bots and provide tutorials and other resources to everyone interested in making chatbots.
There are two resources for bot makers offered in Botwiki’s website, first are the network-specific resources and second are the general resources.
Network-specific resources are Twitter bots, Fediverse bots, Facebook and Messenger bots, Slack bots, Telegram bots, Google Assistant and Home, Amazon Alexa and Echo, YouTube bots, SMS bots, IRC bots, Reddit bots, Twitch bots, kik bots, and Trello bots.
While general resources are programming tutorials, libraries and framework, hosting platforms, public datasets, APIs (Application Programming Interface), and images, audio, and videos.
3. edX
edX is considered as one of the most trusted platforms for education and learning. It is founded by Harvard and MIT. It houses more than 20 million learners. Under its computer programming category, it offers numerous chatbot courses from IBM to help you learn more about chatbots and build them.
Currently, there are four IBM courses for learning chatbots such as Programming Chatbots with Watson Services, How to Build Chatbots and Make Money, Smarter Chatbots with Node-RED and Watson AI, and Building Chatbots Powered by AI.
4. Chatbots Magazine
Chatbots Magazine, also known as CBM is considered as the most widely read and respected source of information about chatbots. It offers a complete beginner’s guide to chatbots. It has more than 20 comprehensive guides to learning chatbots on its website. You can gather information about the best UX (user experience) practices for building chatbots to giving you a list of the best Facebook bots to chat with.
5. Bot Tutorials
Bot Tutorials is a virtual place to learn about chatbot development and design on Facebook Messenger, Line, kik, Slack, Telegram, WeChat, SMS, Web, APIs, IBM Watson, Microsoft Bot Framework, Amazon Lex, Wit.ai, Api.ai, NLP, AWS Lamda, Amazon Alexa, Siri, Google Now, AI, Python, Java, Node.JS, Ruby, Elixir, and so much more!
You can explore and learn things such as integrating Amazon Lex chatbot into your website, how to track conversations from 3rd party chatbots, a guide to building a stable UX for chatbots, high-level chatbot design, and conversational commerce 101.
There are so many informative and useful contents on Bot Tutorial’s website to help you get started in making chatbots.
6. Chatbot Fundamentals
Chatbot Fundamentals tutorial is an interactive guide to writing bots in Python by Liza Daly on World Writable website. There is a sample code in the page where you can modify the code right in your browser and test on different outcomes. They call this sample code “Bro Bot”.
In this tutorial, you will be able to interact with “Brobot” by just simply talking with it!
What’s good about this chatbot coding tutorial is that you’ll get a feel of how it is writing a chatbot code using Python as the programming language. However, if you’re not familiar or you don’t have knowledge of writing code, you may want to learn the basics first.
7. Chatbot Tutorials and Insights
Codementor’s Chatbot Tutorials and Insights community has one of the widest ranges of free resources. You can learn about the latest trends in chatbot and learn from top experts and developers for free.
There are so much to learn, from creating and deploying a Telegram bot using Python or building a Discord bot with Node.js and Repl.it. Worry not if you’re a beginner because there are informative content which helps you build a chatbot for Facebook Messenger from scratch.
Codementor is a website that assists you in finding a developer for live programming help and freelance jobs and the chatbot resources come from experts from across the globe. This gives you more access to different approaches.
8. Deep Learning Chatbot
Deep Learning Chatbot by sentdex is a 9-video tutorial series of creating a chatbot with deep learning, python and tensorflow. Each video is only around 9-20 minutes long, starting with an intro and ending with a demo of how to interact with the chatbot model.
With over 720,000 subscribers, Youtuber sentdex generally blogs everything about Python Programming tutorials: machine learning, finance, robotics, web development and even game development.
Chatbots are really the future of digital marketing and every business owners should make an effort to learn it and be able to integrate it into their businesses.
Chatbot marketing can be the biggest growth opportunity in the coming years for businesses and about 90% of the eCommerce industry benefit from using chatbots.
Chatbots are transforming businesses across the globe because consumers of today have evolved and they want immediate deliveries and solutions when purchasing products and services online. Cutting edge chatbots, when implemented correctly, could help you grow, succeed, and achieve goals.
So if you’re serious about taking mastering messenger chatbot development, bookmark this page and it will sort you out!
About the Author
Larry Kim is the CEO of MobileMonkey, the World’s Best Facebook Messenger Marketing Platform and free chatbot builder. He’s also founder of WordStream, Inc., the leading provider of Google Ads, Facebook Ads and keyword tools used by over a million marketers worldwide. Larry is ranked the #8 most popular author on Medium. He’s a contributor to CNBC and Inc. Magazine.
