The 9 Best Chatbots of 2023
Chatbot technology is quickly improving, but it’s only as good as the value it provides.
The best way to determine the state of chatbots is to assess their advantages in real-life situations. We compiled a list of nine chatbots across various industries that set a good example of how a chatbot should function in 2023. To qualify for this list, we assessed the following criteria:
- Chatbot type: Does the chatbot follow a fixed if-then structure (rule-based) or does it also understand context and learn from customer interactions (context-based/AI-supported)?
- Ease of use: Is it simple to get started and build your bot? Does it improve business processes? Does it have a user-friendly design for both customers and agents?
- Apps & integrations: Can you use the bot with existing software, such as a CRM, and popular messaging channels?
- Price: Is the chatbot worth its price tag? Is it a reasonable option for small to medium-sized businesses?
Based on these criteria, here are our picks for the best chatbots of 2023.
- Userlike AI chatbot: Best support & sales chatbot
- ChatGPT: Best generative AI chatbot
- Dashly: Best lead generation chatbot
- Roof AI: Best real estate chatbot
- Airport AI: Best travel chatbot
- Chatfuel: Best social media chatbot
- Moin AI: Best marketing chatbot
- Paradox AI: Best HR chatbot
- IBM Watson: Best conversational chatbot
- Create the next best chatbot
The AI chatbot is one module of Userlike’s AI Automation Hub, which is a combination of powerful support automation features. It’s rare to find live chat software with a built-in intelligent chatbot and interactive FAQ pages and contact forms. That’s why it’s number one in this list.
Userlike’s AI chatbot is a self-learning solution built for customer support. It pulls its answers from your central knowledge base, which grows and improves over time from conversations.
It’s an ideal solution for making first contact with site visitors, or helping customers at crucial parts in their buyer journey.
A prime example is German cookware company Fissler's chatbot, Cooky. It’s a pleasant-to-use bot that helps with order tracking, reporting issues, sharing inspiration, locating stores in your area and finding products.
For example, if a customer lands on Fissler’s website and doesn’t know where to find specialized equipment, such as woks, Cooky can directly send them to that page.
If your agents are overloaded with common questions and requests, a Userlike chatbot, like Cooky, can proactively answer these chats and only forward the most difficult questions to your team.
This is because the AI chatbot is an extension of Userlike’s live chat and messaging software . You can provide instant, seamless communication on your website and popular channels such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, no outside integrations needed.
In the chat, you can also display button options and carousels to help customers quickly find what they’re looking for. In-chat media also makes it easier to send important documents — such as insurance applications and invoices — or a catalog of your products.
It’s an AI chatbot that’s not only easy for customers to use, but simple for companies to implement.
- Chatbot type: AI chatbot/contextual
- Bot-human handover: Yes, built-in live chat
- Integrations: Trello, Zendesk, Salesforce, Helpscout, Pipedrive and many more
- Compatible apps: WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Threema, SMS
- Price: €490 a month for 10 users (includes Corporate plan and AI Automation Hub add-on)
ChatGPT is a large language model chatbot developed by OpenAI that can have very human-like conversations. Eerily human even, which is what makes it so intriguing and why it always seems to be at full user capacity.
Large language models require enormous amounts of data, up to the petabyte scale. It’s trained to predict what word comes next in a sentence. This level of AI is currently too difficult for businesses to maintain, and quite frankly its scope of abilities goes beyond customer service.
ChatGPT can do it all — write your LinkedIn posts, argue with you about politics, help you learn a new language, find the best hotels and even do your homework… unless your school blocks it on campus.
It’s one of the first chatbots that can also help grow your business without actually being on your website. It can be your free marketing assistant and help write texts for your blog and ads, or come up with image ideas. It can even write code and debug it.
Of course, it’s not 100% accurate, which is why I only recommend using ChatGPT for inspiration when creating chat flows and marketing content.
- Chatbot type: AI chatbot/contextual
- Bot-human handover: No
- Integrations: Zapier, which then lets you connect to popular apps such as Slack
- Compatible apps: WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and more
- Price: $42 a month for improved stability, speed and features, API plans vary in pricing
Dashly offers an intuitive chatbot builder with automation features for lead generation. Their custom chatbot can collect visitors’ contact information, which is directly transferred to your CRM or other customer management software.
This chatbot provider is particularly trusted by online schools to encourage students who interacted with webinars and landing pages to sign up for paid courses.
Learn-E, for example, successfully use Dashly chatbots to convert their traffic into leads. It proactively initiates conversations and uses button options to share course programs and discuss tuition.
When a chatbot talks to a lead, it creates a profile in their CRM system for manager follow-up. In just two months, Learn-E’s chatbots brought in $16,194 of revenue and increased their conversion rates.
You don’t need technical knowledge to add Dashly to your website — according to their customers, it’s easy to install.
- Chatbot type: Button-based decision tree
- Bot-human handover: Yes
- Integrations: Email notifications, Zoom, Calendly, ConvergeHub
- Compatible apps: WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook Messenger
- Price: Starts at $31 a month for one chatbot
Roof AI specializes in real estate automation. Their chatbot helps qualify real estate, mortgage and agent recruiting prospects, answer inquiries, schedule tours and create customer profiles.
Their most notable chatbot is Sunny for The Keyes Company. This Florida-based realtor created Sunny to help customers search for properties to rent or buy. It uses natural language processing and button options in the conversation to help narrow down what customers are looking for.
Conversations with Roof AI’s chatbot are very human-like — they “type” and send responses at a realistic pace. It also uses short, precise questions to learn what the user is looking for and, in the case of Sunny, has a calm, helpful persona and feel to it.
On The Keyes Company’s website, contact is also low-barrier. Users can open the chat at any time and start a conversation right away. Sunny only asks for contact information later in the conversation once it has all the information it needs to connect you to an agent.
- Chatbot type: AI chatbot/contextual
- Bot-human handover: Yes
- Integrations: Slack, Twitter, Gmail, LinkedIn
- Compatible apps: Facebook Messenger
- Price: Price upon request
Premium guide to automation in support
Learn the top ways your business will benefit from AI-driven customer support.
Download for freeWhen traveling, you spend hours at the airport. That’s not even considering delays, layovers and cancellations that may leave you stranded in the terminal. And if you’re disabled or traveling with kids and pets, you need to know where the ramps, play areas and grassy spots are.
Airport AI specifically created AI automation to improve passenger’s airport experience and cut customer service costs. It’s accessible on multiple devices and uses both button options and typed responses to interact with customers.
At Brussels Airport, instead of asking personnel or checking an airport map, you can use their Airport AI chatbot Bruce. It’s available on WhatsApp, Messenger and their website, making it easily accessible.
Bruce can share the shops and restaurants near your gate, let you know which trains to take and where to park — and even help you book a parking pass.
If you share your flight info, Bruce can send you real-time updates so you can shop and enjoy waiting in peace without having to look for a flight screen every 20 minutes.
Airport AI truly got it right with Brussels Airport’s chatbot. Bruce is available on multiple channels, allows for written and button options and can perform small but important tasks. These are the modern chatbot features customers expect from businesses.
- Chatbot type: Rule-based
- Bot-human handover: Yes
- Integrations: Website widget, Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa
- Compatible apps: WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Twitter
- Price: Price upon request
Chatfuel started as a Facebook chatbot builder but has since expanded to Instagram and WhatsApp and websites. It’s a good solution for small businesses or departments who want to automate their service without investing too much effort.
The bot builder offers pre-made templates, so you don’t need to write chatbot scripts to get started.
They’re most notable for Lego’s chatbot Ralph, which helped customers choose the right Christmas gifts, and HelloFresh’s support chatbot Freddy.
Since expanding their offered channels, Chatfuel has helped retail brands like ILTHY and Art&Fact use chatbots to engage customers in messages and promote discount codes.
To build a chatbot, you use “blocks” to create your flows. You can edit the texts in these blocks or use the ones already generated for you. This lets teams build chatbots without a developer, though the conversations will be simple and less human-like than other solutions in this best chatbots comparison.
- Chatbot type: Rule-based
- Bot-human handover: Yes
- Integrations: Website widget
- Compatible apps: Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram
- Price: $11.99 a month for up to 500 conversations
MoinAI is a chatbot platform that offers features to help you automate your marketing and sales.
They provide conversation flow templates for important use cases so your business doesn’t need to start from scratch when creating a marketing chatbot, for example.
German bike company ROSE created a helpful, self-learning chatbot for their website. Users can type freely to ROSE bot to find products and receive site navigation help. It mimics human typing speed and uses a combination of button options and conversational AI to assist the user.
When you need personalized assistance, it offers to connect you to an agent via live chat or send an email message for follow-up. However, to use agents as a fallback option, you need to connect moinAI to an external live chat provider, like Userlike.
- Chatbot type: AI chatbot/contextual
- Bot-human handover: Yes
- Integrations: Userlike, Falcon.io, Zapier
- Compatible apps: Facebook Messenger
- Price: €790 with unlimited chats for one account and chatbot
Paradox AI created Olivia, an HR assistant bot that takes over repetitive questions and follow-up messages so recruitment staff can focus on people, not tasks.
It uses conversational AI so applicants can freely type to the bot and receive warm, human-sounding replies instantly. The bot can also screen candidates through conversation, schedule interviews, answer questions from candidates and send reminders.
However, Olivia is so advanced that it could actually be mistaken for a human, so it’s up to companies to state that it’s a bot.
There’s also the issue of Paradox AI using an image of a real woman for Olivia. Their founder’s wife, actually. At Userlike, we discourage using pictures of humans when creating your chatbot because it could set the wrong expectations and frustrate your users.
That being said, Olivia is a welcomed solution to cutting down long hiring processes that frustrate both HR and applicants.
- Chatbot type: AI chatbot/contextual
- Bot-human handover: Yes
- Integrations: SAP, Workday, Indeed, Equifax, Zoom, Gmail and many more
- Compatible apps: WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger
- Price: Price upon request
IBM Watson uses deep learning, machine learning, and natural language processing (NLP) to understand questions, choose the best answers and respond to the user through conversational AI.
For example, the Royal Bank of Scotland created Cora to help with banking inquiries. Cora has thousands of answers to more than 200 common customer intents. It speaks to over 40k customers a day, and is able to fully assist 27% of conversations while the rest are forwarded when the customer needs more specialized help.
RBS created Cora and Marge when they noticed many of their customers started to prefer mobile banking. To maintain their status as the number one bank for customer service, they started opening chat slots a little at a time, and grew from a team of five agents to over 1000.
Cora, like many chatbots in banking, maintains a professional tone with an air of Scottish hospitality.
When Cora doesn’t understand a request after a couple tries, it lets the user choose to ask another question, check their FAQ or speak to an agent. Despite Cora’s advanced AI, it’s still sometimes limited in how it can help customers.
- Chatbot type: AI chatbot/contextual
- Bot-human handover: Yes
- Integrations: Slack, Twilio, Oracle Cloud B2C
- Compatible apps: WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger
- Price: Free for up to 10,000 messages with limited skills
10
Create the next best chatbot
Feeling inspired? Want to create your own great bot? What if I told you that you can have your own self-learning AI without touching a single line of code.
At Userlike, we built our AI Automation Hub so businesses could have a centralized knowledge base connected to powerful AI features. The hub powers three modules: an AI chatbot, Smart FAQ and Contact Form Suggestions.
The AI chatbot picks up conversations where customers left off — a perk not every chatbot platform provides. Most chatbots “reset” once you leave the website, but customers can see their previous conversation with the AI chatbot before deciding to continue it or start a new one.
Just like our AI chatbot mentioned above, our Smart FAQ and Contact Form Suggestions pull answers from the knowledge base full of your business data and improve its answers over time.
The Smart FAQ is a responsive self-service portal that helps customers resolve their issues quickly. You can pin popular topics to the top and ensure that customers receive consistent answers with every search.
Contact Form Suggestions attempts to answer the customer’s question before they write to your team. This reduces tickets and redundant inquiries, freeing up your agents’ time.
Both features use auto-completion to answer customer questions as they’re typing them, saving time and effort.
To learn more about our automation features, read our post, “Automation with AI: introducing new powerful AI features.”
If you’d prefer to test it for yourself, sign up for a free two-week trial of Userlike and see our customer messaging software and automation features in action.
If you like our chatbot features, reach out to our team in the chat on our website or contact us at support@userlike.com. Let’s create the next best chatbot together!
