For any business to run effectively, it is highly essential to maintain the customer relationships efficiently through an ERP system. It is widely known that SAP is one of the best ERP systems available. What if a new technology like AI enabled Chatbot, is integrated with the SAP systems? Don’t you think there is a high probability of building better relationships with users which might probably increase the revenue of the business indirectly? So all this seems to be a bit convincing right!!! Yeah…. let’s get started.

In this blog, I am NOT going to stress more on use cases to develop a bot, but the REAL Chatbot Development. This is going to be a series of blogs which will be very helpful for the aspiring chatbot developers. So let’s start with the basics. My prior aim of writing this blog is to develop a chatbot considering the SAP. Others can also follow this blog as I will be discussing a lot of things related to Chatbot Development.

There are a hell lot of things involved while developing chatbots as depicted in the above figure:

1. NLP Tool:

We are going to use dialog flow for this series of blogs. Other good platforms are IBM Watson, Microsoft Bot Framework, Manychat, Amazon Lex. We can also create our own custom logic by using deep learning in our bot

2. Backend Development:

We are going to use Node.js for handling all the backend API requests. Technologies like PHP and Python can also be used

3. Social Platform Integration:

We are going to use Messenger for integrating our bot. Other platforms like slack, a line can also be used.

4. Frontend Development:

As we are using Messenger, it is easy to create rich UI by following the docs of developers.facebook.com. Certain complex things require the development of WebView where a custom view is created using languages like HTML, CSS, Ajax and JavaScript.

5. Database:

I am not going to handle this part in this blog as I am going to use SAP technology. In general, any database like MySQL, Oracle can be used and the relevant API’s can be developed in the desired backend framework.

The above content might be a bit intimidating for the beginners but believe me, this is going to be very interesting as we move on.

Watch this space for my next blog where I will discuss the NLP Tool – Dialogflow (intents, actions, entities, events and most importantly webhooks)