Overview

API.Ai is Google’s flavour of chat bot, imbued with Natural Language Processing and some AI right off the bat, available to start for free. This project was initially developed by a third party team as a personal assistant AI before being acquired by Google.

It is a great, robust way to get started quickly and inexpensively with a chat bot that can augment or perhaps replace the UI of your application or business.

I would highly recommend it particularly for small businesses or projects, and definitely for hackathon products. It is fast and easy to implement for web applications, and otherwise very developer-friendly.

Any comparisons I make in this post will be to a competitor in the space, IBM Watson, as I didn’t find enough evidence of difference with other competitors to be bothered exploring Wit AI (Facebook) or LUIS (Microsoft).

Pros & Cons

Good

  • Easy integration with other channels and services (Slack, FB, Text etc)
  • All agent logic sits in one place, and can be opened up to a great number of incoming channels and user interfaces.
  • Simple editor, easy for non-devs to work with
  • Pre-loaded with knowledge and ability on small talk (Free) and a host of other areas (paid)
  • Very quick to set up with numerous libraries (I used JS)
  • Able to use web hooks to interact easily with your (or any public) API
  • Flexible implementation
  • Good documentation for most regular use cases
  • Easily able to train the bot by correcting intent matches
  • Easily clone agents by exporting/importing training data (For backups or test environments)

See the API.Ai sales page for a more comprehensive list of features and support capabilities.

Bad

  • Not as secure or ready for enterprise level implementation (compared to competitor Watson, IBM)
  • Not able to host your own instance of your agent (would be helpful for enterprise solutions to ensure data security)

When to use

It might be a good idea to look at using API.Ai if:

  • You want to get up and running quickly (Hackathons? Side projects?)
  • You want quick and easy integrations with Facebook, Slack, Twitter, Twilio, Skype and more
  • You don’t want to build an interface into your application (Use Facebook Messenger instead!)
  • You are not handling sensitive user information that you don’t want passed through API.Ai servers. (You can most likely get around this with clever development and a well-written disclaimer)

When not use

You probably don’t want to use API.Ai if:

  • You are handling sensitive user information that you don’t want passed through API.Ai servers
  • You answer to a big corporate team who need all data hosted on their own servers and want to minimise any external exposure/usage of that data
  • You want a big enterprise solution