A chat bot is a service, powered by rules and sometimes artificial intelligence which converse via natural language text interfaces.
Amazon offers its own service on AWS to build Conversation Bots known as Amazon Lex.
Whereas, Microsoft offers a set of Cognitive services and Bot Framework to build chat bot on Azure and also locally.
Amazon Lex
Amazon Lex became generally available to developers from April 2017.
Let us see what are the Pro’s and Cons of building a chatbot on Lex.
Pro’s
- SDK support – You can build iOS, Android, Java, JavaScript, Python, .Net, Ruby, PHP, Go, and C++ bots that span mobile, web, desktop, and IoT platforms.
- natural language processing
- Speech and text support
- utterance Monitoring
- scalable
- AWS lambda integration
- SaaS Connectors
- mobile integration
Con’s
- Complex web integration
- less deployment channels
- Lex in not multilingual, supports only English
- Preparation of data set is complicated, the utterances and entities mapping is somewhat critical.
Microsoft Bot framework
MS Bot Framework was released a year before the Lex i.e around march 2016.
Let us see what are the Pro’s and Cons of building a chat bot using Microsoft Bot Framework:
Pro’s
- Structured development Environment
- Bot Builder SDK in multiple language
- Bot connector
- Bot Service for registration of bots
- Web integration is easy
- Multiple channels like skype, fb, kik, webchat, Directline etc
- REST API support, deploy the bot as REST service
- Speech and text support
- Multilingual
- Works with multiple Cognitive services like face recognition, text analysis,spell check APIs
- Scalable
- Intents and Utterance creation is done by LUIS API
- Pre-built Entities
- Technical Support
- Documentation is very good
Con’s
- The only drawback it has is that SDK support is for only two languages(Node.js and C#)
Overall Microsoft Bot framework is better than Amazon Lex in current phase. Hope Lex will catch up soon and build its own market to compete with others.
The Web Spark 