Chances are, your large enterprise has a partnership or agreement in place with one of the big three cloud providers and you are probably wanting to understand the chatbot services that each cloud provider has to offer. In this post, I’m going to list the top three cloud providers and their respective services to help you understand what each one offers.
Chatbots and virtual assistant platforms have the ability to interact with your customers, readers, and visitors to help simulate a human conversation with the goal of being able to provide helpful information. On various platforms, you can program a chatbot or virtual assistant to respond to specific key phrases as well as questions along with the ability to have more in depth conversations about specific topic areas.
While there are a multitude of chatbot platforms where their businesses are exclusively in the niche like Kore.AI, SmartBot,, Avaamo, Botcore, and Smarttek 21, sometimes just to get started, your business will probably already have a provider you are working with like AWS, GCP, and Azure. As someone who has been in the business of choosing service providers and going through the RFP process, what I have found is that to get started with a proof of concept, generally it’s better to start it with a service provider you are already working with.
With that said, most of these large cloud providers have over 100+ services that they offer, and sometimes, you just want to know the names of the services so you can get started on the research to building your own bot.
In this post, I’m going to breakdown these large cloud providers and the services and related frameworks that they have to offer in order to get your company started with using a chatbot. And if you are interested, I wrote all about how you can generate a return on investment by investing in a chatbot.
Top Three Cloud Provider Chatbot Platforms
The following are the top three cloud providers listed with their chatbot platforms/frameworks that are available.
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) – Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly
- Microsoft Azure – Bot Service, Bot Framework, PowerVirtual Agent
- Google Cloud Platform (GCP) – Dialogflow
Benefits of Going with a Larger Cloud Provider Chatbot Platform vs Niche Company
The main benefit of going with AWS, Azure, and GCP is because of the documentation and tutorials that are readily available across the internet in order to help setup, initialize, and troubleshoot the chatbot.
While smaller companies can certainly provide you documentation, those maybe very niche, making the availability of very specific topics hard to find.
With a smaller company, you’ll probably find a more personalized interaction with the team, which provides for a great partnership. If your company is a unicorn (like most think they are), and you want a partner that will work with you to get your specific needs met, choosing a niche provider who will agree to work with you to add in additional features may be a smart move.
However, if you are a company that is just looking to add a tried-and-true approach to implementing a chatbot service, I would recommend initially working with a cloud provider and THEN finding out that your needs outgrow what the cloud provider can provide.
Amazon Web Services Chatbot Solutions
Amazon Lex
Summary of Amazon Lex
Amazon Lex is the machine learning technology that includes natural language processing (NLP) which allows you to identify what customers are asking based on the language that is being used. It allows you to power conversation through both text and voice. Lex is the technology that powers the rich conversational experiences that are familiar with Amazon Alexa.
Pricing of Amazon Lex
Amazon Lex charges $4 per 1,000 speech requests and $0.75 for 1,000 text requests.
Amazon Polly
Summary of Amazon Polly
Amazon Polly is an AWS speech service that allows you to turn text into human-like speech patterns so that it can directly talk to a customer. The files can then be downloaded as an mp3 file for use with other application and services.
Pricing of Amazon Polly
AWS Polly is charged at $4.00 per million characters for speech and Speech Marks requests when used outside of the free tier. Amazon Polly’s Neural voices are priced at $16 per million characters for speech and Speech Marks.
AWS Chatbot
Summary of AWS Chatbot
While the name of this service may say otherwise, AWS Chatbot is NOT a virtual assistant that your customers will utilize to converse with in order to extract data. It is for developers and cloud architects that need to monitor resource utilization and health regularly. It is a service that allows you to extract notifications from a handful of services. and send them to Slack chat rooms and Chime. AWS Chatbot allows you to respond to any events that occur in your AWS Cloud.
Pricing for AWS Chatbot
With AWS Chatbot, you only pay for the services that are used like Amazon Simple Notification and AWS Guard Duty.
Microsoft Azure Chatbot Solutions
Azure Bot Service
Summary of Azure Bot Service
Azure Bot Service allows you to develop, deploy, and host a chatbot quickly and efficiently and deploy it across popular devices and channels (like Teams and Slack).
Pricing of Azure Bot Service
- Free Tier of Azure Bot Service. Unlimited messages on standard channels; 10,000 messages/month on premium channels
- S1 Tier of Azure Bot Service.. Unlimited messages on standard channels; $0.50 per 1,000 messages on premium channels
Azure Bot Framework
Summary of Azure Bot Framework
Azure Bot Framework is an open source SDK with tools for end-to-end bot development for your organizations. It allows you to build your chatbot through various components and features through a modular approach that is also extensible.
Pricing of Azure Bot Framework
- Free Tier of Azure Bot Framework. Unlimited messages on standard channels; 10,000 messages/month on premium channels
- S1 Tier of Azure Bot Framework. Unlimited messages on standard channels; $0.50 per 1,000 messages on premium channels
Power Virtual Agent
Summary of Power Virtual Agent
Power Virtual Agents allows you to build chatbots with no code at all. It allows teams to create bots using a non-code, user interface without the need for hiring data scientists and developers.
Pricing of Power Virtual Agent
Power Virtual Agents costs $1,000 per month for 2,000 sessions.Additional sessions cost $450 per month for up to 1,000 sessions.
Google Cloud Provider Chatbots
GCP Dialogflow
Summary of Google’s Dialogflow
Dialogflow is powered by natural language processing (NLP) that can be used to create conversational experiences and interfaces on multiple languages and throughout multiple platforms. The big benefit of Dialogflow is that the user interface is really intuitive as well as an offering of software development kits to help aid in building bots for various devices, cars, wearables, and speakers.
Pricing of GCP Dialogflow
Google is charging at the enterprise level $0.002 per text interaction request and $0.0065 per voice interaction request. There is a free version with a limit of 1,000 interactions per day (with a total of 15,000 interactions per month).
Summary of Chatbot Services and Solutions within Popular Cloud Providers
With all the various offerings of these large cloud providers, it can be difficult to understand which services offer the specific solutions to having and standing up a chatbot solution and service. As you can see, there are varying degrees of chatbot services out there. For some, you’ll need to hire a data scientist and developer. For others, you can just get a skilled business analyst to create the bot, but the platform to do this will cost you.
I hope this provides you some insight on some of the frameworks and services out there to start yo on your journey to creating a chatbot for your business.
Other Chatbot Development Lifecycle Posts You Might Like
- Azure Bot Services Explained
- Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Power Virtual Agents
- Beginner’s Guide to Chatbot Development Lifecycle
- Create a Chatbot for Free Using Google Dialogflow