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Have you ever used a WhatsApp chatbot?
WhatsApp has over 2 billion users, making it the prime channel to deploy an AI chatbot.
In 2024, the platform ranked as the world’s most popular messaging platform and the 4th most popular social media app.
The best user experiences meet users where they’re at – which is why more and more companies are using WhatsApp to directly connect with their customers.
Why use a WhatsApp AI Chatbot?
WhatsApp has become the leading communication channel worldwide. If you want to keep up with competitors, you need to offer communication services directly to your customers.
It’s becoming increasingly common for organizations to offer conversational AI support – from customer service chatbots to lead gen bots to hospitality booking systems.
With an AI chatbot, you can send automated messages from your WhatsApp number, update an order status for a customer, or host a conversation with a user at any time of day.
There’s a lot of WhatsApp chatbot tools on the market. In this article, we’ll give you 5 user friendly chatbot tools that allow you to have AI conversations over WhatsApp.
And we’ll explain everything you need to know about WhatsApp bots – why they’re popular, how they work, and how you can build your own for free.
Multilingual Support
Imagine the cost of providing professional multilingual assistance to your users. But with AI, multilingual support is free.
Chatbot translation involves intercepting messages from users, identifying their language, and translating these messages to and from the bot's operating language. This allows a seamless chatbot experience in your users’ native languages.
This process entails:
- Storing the detected language
- Translating the user's message to the bot's language
- Processing the message, and then
- Translating the bot's response back to the user's language
For instance, if a user sends a message in Spanish, the bot will store "es" as the language variable. The software will translate the message to English for the bot, and then translate the bot's response back to Spanish before sending it to the user.
WhatsApp chatbot tools allow you to conduct a personalized experience over chat. When a user is able to read a message in their own language, it makes for a more memorable and positive customer experience.
AI chatbots offer multilingual support in a way that isn’t possible for human agents. For companies with international presence, aiming to expand globally, or in areas with diverse language demographics (like India and the United States), WhatsApp chatbots are a necessity.
Types of WhatsApp Chatbots
There are a wide variety of chatbots you can deploy to WhatsApp – they can handle marketing campaigns, excel at answering questions, and can connect with a human agent when needed.
Their wide range of capabilities means there’s limitless ways to use WhatsApp chatbot tools to scale your business or automate your communications with chatbot conversations.
The most popular types of WhatsApp chatbots include:
Customer Service Bots
One of the most common types of WhatsApp chatbot, customer service chatbots are everywhere these days.
Their popularity is for good reason. A well-designed chatbot can make customer support services faster and cheaper while increasing customer satisfaction.
Customer service chatbots also offer easy scalability, integrations with your company’s documents, and consistent service. If you want to prepare your company for increasing volume without similar rising costs, a customer service chatbot allows you to handle far more queries than live agents alone.
Once they’re integrated with your core documents (data, policies, or your entire website), they can provide up-to-date information for your customers – no need to ask a human to check internal sources.
While many see customer service chatbots as a drain, a well-designed one will enhance customer interactions. WhatsApp automation allows your customer service reps to spend their time on high-impact conversations.
Booking and Reservation Bots
WhatsApp is the tool of choice for thousands of booking services worldwide. It’s a popular choice due to the repetitive nature of bookings – customers can easily pick a time or select a room with a chatbot.
WhatsApp is the most common channel when deploying chatbots for hotels, since employees and guests alike use the messaging service.
A reservation chatbot is especially useful for international services, like hotels, tourism, and hospitality. Tourists usually make bookings before arriving at their destination – by making your booking system available on WhatsApp, you can reach customers anywhere in the world.
One of our partners, hostifAI, found that hotels with WhatsApp chatbots were able to provide faster and more reliable services for their guests. As CEO Badr Lemkhente explains:
“Last week, our Virtual Butler received a request from a guest who needed to order room service and had a special request for an additional bathroom towel. The Virtual Butler effectively guided the guest through the room service options . . . and promptly transmitted the requests to the appropriate staff. What's notable is that both needs were handled within the same conversation, even though they had to be processed by two different teams.”
You can read more about our clients’ implementation of hotel chatbots here.
HR Bots
While we often think of company-to-customer chatbots, internal chatbots are increasingly common across industries. They can be used to communicate HR policies, book meetings, and distribute company information to employees.
The main appeal of internal AI bots is that they can be trained on internal company documents. If you want a chatbot to communicate HR policies, you don’t need to program an old-fashioned rule-based chatbot – with the right chatbot tools, you can train your chatbot to answer questions based on specific documents.
If an employee has an HR question, they can easily send a message to the company’s WhatsApp chatbot as a precursor to in-person conversations.
HR bots aren’t intended to replace HR representatives. But they can streamline HR services, the same way they streamline customer service queries or student questions for a TA.
Chatbots are used best when they’re intertwined with existing human processes. Blending human and artificial intelligence leads to benefits for companies and employees alike.
By taking routine tasks away from human agents, a chatbot can allow them to focus on more strategic or complex tasks.
Top 5 WhatsApp Chatbot Builders
When selecting a WhatsApp chatbot platform, it’s important to take into consideration the desired purpose of your WhatsApp bot and your level of coding expertise.
The best WhatsApp chatbot tools vary based on your needs. You’ll definitely want a platform that has a pre-built WhatsApp integration. Our suggestions include chatbot tools with free tiers and integrations for multiple channels.
We’ve compiled a list to help you find the best WhatsApp chatbot platform for your business:
1. Botpress
Botpress is powered by the latest LLMs from OpenAI. The platform offers plenty of pre-built integrations that allow you to seamless connect your chatbot to WhatsApp.
The engine automatically translates content into 100+ languages, allowing you to easily chat with users around the world.
It includes a free tier, as well as a pay-as-you-go option for higher-intensity building requirements.
The Botpress Studio is highly customizable and extensible – if you code, you have endless possibilities for building your bot. If you’re looking for a low-code option, the Studio is easily accessible to beginners thanks to its drag-and-drop interface, Botpress Academy courses, and YouTube channel of tutorials.
The benefits of Botpress include:
- Seamless integration with WhatsApp and other messaging channels
- Connectivity with your knowledge databases and humans
- Your bots can take actions – like booking a meeting, changing a password, or updating a database
- Savings on AI spend with query caching
- A robust backend that offers automatic versioning, scalability, CICD, and security
2. Yellow.ai
Yellow.AI has a wide array of functionalities that allow businesses to serve their customers efficiently through WhatsApp Business accounts. It can provide proactive support, process payments, and even enhance sales through upselling.
Yellow.AI's proactive messaging capabilities enable it to initiate conversations aimed at cross-selling and upselling products, maximizing revenue potential.
Potential users should be aware of the lack of transparent pricing, which can make cost assessment challenging.
3. WATI
WATI.io is designed specifically for businesses looking to leverage WhatsApp as their primary customer engagement medium.
One of the standout features of WATI.io is its shared inbox, which allows multiple team members to collaborate. The platform offers the capability to send broadcast and bulk messages, facilitating outreach to a larger audience.
However, WATI.io may not be the ideal choice for businesses in need of customer support ticketing capabilities. While it excels in automating various aspects of customer engagement, it does not offer a specific ticketing system for managing and tracking customer support requests.
Businesses with a strong focus on customer support ticketing may need to explore additional solutions.
4. Messagebird
MessageBird is an omnichannel communication platform that offers an AI chatbot for automating customer interactions. It provides a wide range of integrations, enabling businesses to maintain a cohesive and streamlined customer engagement strategy.
One of the key advantages of MessageBird is its ability to send notifications and alerts automatically.
It also offers a shared inbox, allowing teams to collaborate seamlessly in managing integrated customer support. It's worth noting that while MessageBird's integrations are extensive, they can contribute to higher costs for businesses, potentially making it expensive for some users.
Additionally, there have been reports of occasional instability and repeated outages, which may pose challenges in maintaining consistent and reliable customer communication.
5. Interakt
With a range of features, including automated notifications and 24/7 customer support facilitated by WhatsApp chatbots, Interakt provides comprehensive support for businesses looking to harness the potential of WhatsApp as a communication channel.
Interakt offers the advantage of green tick verification for WhatsApp business accounts, which enhances trust and authenticity in customer interactions.
Additionally, the platform enables businesses to leverage cross-selling and upselling opportunities by sharing product catalogs through WhatsApp. However, Interakt lacks the ability to create a group for team communication, which may limit internal collaboration options.
Users have also reported that the user interface (UI) could be improved, with occasional experiences of slow loading speeds and message delays.
How to build a WhatsApp chatbot
To get started building your WhatsApp chatbot, start by identifying the correct chatbot tools. These options range from highly technical and customizable, to no-code solutions.
With Botpress, you get both (and everything in between). The platform is highly customizable and extensible, or you can use our templates to build a low-code chatbot that you can deploy tomorrow.
Your chatbot can automatically connect to WhatsApp for free using our built-in integration – no coding required.
If you want to learn more, check out our:
- Article on how to connect a bot to WhatsApp
- Documentation on how to connect to WhatsApp (for developers)
- YouTube video about how to connect to WhatsApp
WhatsApp API and Meta
You’ll need to use WhatsApp Business API to connect your business WhatsApp to Botpress (or any other messaging software). The WhatsApp API allows you to connect your bot to the platform.
You’ll want to use the WhatsApp Business app, so you can track marketing and sales data from your WhatsApp bot. You can also get analytics from your chatbot from the Botpress Studio after you deploy your bot.
Since WhatsApp is owned by Meta (the parent company for Facebook and Instagram), you’ll need a Facebook Business account to get started. This can help you get up to speed if you want to deploy your AI bot across other messaging platforms, like Facebook Messenger.
It’s important to note that all WhatsApp chatbot tools will require you to register a business account with Meta before you can deploy a bot to WhatsApp. Once you set up your chatbot, all incoming messages will be sent to your WhatsApp phone numbers.
You can facilitate the entire process from start to deployment for free.
How do WhatsApp chatbots work?
WhatsApp chatbots are powered by artificial intelligence (AI). They use natural language processing (NLP) to interpret and respond to user input – like customer queries.
Natural language processing allows AI entities to mimic patterns in human interactions. Using deep learning, your WhatsApp bot can improve its performance over time. The more it interacts, the better it becomes at its job. Since AI learns as it goes, your bot will become more equipped to handle user queries over time.
WhatsApp chatbot tools employ conversational AI to provide scalable user interactions. Your bot can message back and forth with WhatsApp chat anywhere in the world, in over 100 languages. NLP technology ensures that the interaction feels engaging and responsive for the user.
With the right chatbot platforms, you can set up an AI bot for free – most WhatsApp chatbot tools have both free versions for basic bots and paid versions for bots that need extra capabilities.
What makes a good WhatsApp chatbot?
The best WhatsApp chatbots are powered by the top LLMs, integrated with other software and services, equipped with security and compliance features, and are both customizable and scalable.
Powered by LLMs
When we think of the simple chatbots of yesteryear, we’re usually picturing a rule-based chatbot. But these days, most companies use AI driven chatbots.
A rule-based chatbot operates on a predefined set of rules. They can only respond to the specific questions that they have been designed to understand. They follow a simple logic based on ‘if-then’ programming.
While these bots are suitable for simple FAQs, they’re unable to fully engage users. If they run into a new input from a user, they get stuck. Using a rule-based system will allow you to create only a simple WhatsApp chatbot.
WhatsApp chatbots need to be powered by LLMs – like OpenAI’s GPT or Google’s Gemini – in order to properly perform basic tasks. You’re unlikely to make any gains in customer satisfaction from a rule-based chatbot.
The right WhatsApp chatbot tools will automatically connect you to the latest LLMs, so that your chatbot can deliver personalized interactions, send human-like messages, and even generate images.
Integration capabilities
The top chatbot software will allow you to add pre-built integrations – not just to WhatsApp, but internal data sources (like CRMs) and other platforms.
The best WhatsApp chatbots can connect to:
- Documents, tables, and websites, so they can provide up-to-date information
- Other channels and platforms, so they can update information
First-rate WhatsApp chatbot tools will allow you to connect your bot to other sources of documentation, like an HR policy document, a table that lists which retail items you have in stock, or your website.
Once your bot is connected to these external sources, it can use the data to provide accurate responses. If potential customers ask to book a tour group, the bot can immediately see whether there are sufficient spaces for the day and time they request.
Integrations with other platforms allow you to have your bot make changes after receiving a message from a user, like resetting a password.
If you connect to integrations, you can create an AI agent that takes actions independently from a human agent. Adding pre-built integrations is the fastest way to level up your AI agent.
Customization
If you’re deploying a chatbot, it should be customized to your specific business offering.
Even when using WhatsApp, your chatbot can be customized visually and linguistically – maybe your HR chatbot should always speak in a friendly and formal tone. Or maybe your hotel chatbot uses traditional phrases in its messages to guests.
As a central communication checkpoint of your customer experience, you should ensure your chatbot is reflective of your brand, messaging, and positioning.
Scalability
A major highlight of using an AI WhatsApp chatbot is its ability to scale.
Unlike a human, a chatbot can chat with several people in tandem and facilitate conversations 24/7. Automating these business processes is necessary for scaling your operation.
The best chatbot tools will allow you to scale your bot to handle growing numbers of customers, users, guests, or employees.
A WhatsApp chatbot – depending on your business needs – will likely be your first channel deployment. But as you scale, you can make your chatbot available across multiple channels, like your website, Facebook Messenger, or responding to text messages.
Security and compliance features
If you’ll be handling personal data from users, you should ensure you take all necessary precautions regarding data privacy.
If you build your own chatbot, you’ll need to build within the security and privacy regulations of your country (and in some cases, the countries of your users). This will also require being up to date on all necessary data protection regulations for your users.
If you build with a chatbot software platform, you should pick one that provides robust security measures.
If you’ll be handling personal data (including telephone numbers, addresses, or account numbers) from individuals in the EU, you’ll need to comply with GDPR regulations. You can read more about how to make your WhatsApp chatbot GDPR compliant here.
Make a WhatsApp chatbot today
WhatsApp is the best way to directly connect with users. Botpress makes this connection as easy as possible – we provide plenty of pre-built integrations, including WhatsApp.
Our flexible studio offers both low-code and highly customizable and extensible building options. On Botpress, you can build whatever you want.
If you’re looking for extra help building your bot, you can find how-to resources on:
- Botpress Academy: our expert-curated courses, guides and tutorials
- Our YouTube channel: videos with step-by-step explanations for bot building
Start building today. It’s free.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much is a WhatsApp chatbot?
The specific pricing options for WhatsApp chatbot tools vary among providers. Some offer free options or demos, while others have specific pricing models.
Assessing the features and capabilities that align with your needs is an important step to figuring out your pricing options.
Who should use a WhatsApp chatbot?
WhatsApp chatbots are especially useful for organizations with high numbers of user or customer communications.
They can be used for both small and large businesses. They help small businesses grow by automating customer communication. And they help large businesses scale.
What is a WhatsApp chatbot used for?
A WhatsApp chatbot can be used for any user interactions, including customer service, sales, bookings, and surveys. They allow you to chat with large numbers of users for free.
Should I get a WhatsApp chatbot?
With over 2 billion users, WhatsApp chatbots allow you to reach your customers directly. They’re low-cost, easy to build, available 24/7, and lead to communication savings. WhatsApp chatbots are especially useful for companies with international customers or multilingual users.
What’s the best WhatsApp chatbot?
The best WhatsApp chatbot is one that fits your specific business needs. Try to find a bot-building software that allows for customizability, integrations, and security.
What's WhatsApp API?
WhatsApp business API is a programmable API that allows you to automate messages and integrate with other platforms.
Can I build a WhatsApp chatbot for free?
Yes, many WhatsApp chatbot tools allow you to build free models. Platforms like Botpress provide a drag-and-drop studio and a free built-in WhatsApp integration.
Is it hard to build a WhatsApp chatbot?
If you’re using a bot-building platform, it’s easy to set up a WhatsApp bot. Depending on the platform you use, the learning curve will vary.
Can I make a group chat WhatsApp chatbot?
As long as you use a customizable and extensible chatbot platform, you can code your chatbot to facilitate nearly anything in a WhatsApp chat.
Does WhatsApp offer chatbots?
Meta recently introduced Meta AI for its messaging platforms. You can ask it questions; however, this chatbot is not customizable.
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