Why You Should Train a Chatbot on Your Own Data

Why You Should Train a Chatbot on Your Own Data

Josh ReolaJosh Reola
4 mins

You should train your chatbot on your own data to provide a more tailored, contextualized AI experience for users. This process includes scraping your website or uploading document files to the database.

Scraping your website

Web scraping is a form of data extraction. It involves bots systematically browsing websites for information and copying it into a database. Unlike screen scraping, which copies pixels onscreen, web scraping goes much deeper by extracting text from the underlying HTML source code. This allows it to replicate entire websites.

It's used for a variety of purposes. Search engines use it to analyze and rank website content. Price comparison sites use it to collect pricing and product descriptions from e-commerce sites. Market research companies use it to gather information on social media and forums. It's also how large language models like ChatGPT are trained.

Uploading documents

You can upload document files to your chatbot, so it can analyze them and answer questions about them. This can be helpful when you need to process receipts, forms or other types of customer documents. It also saves you time because you don’t have to send them to a human for help.

Chatbots that use natural language processing (NLP) can understand text and respond to it with meaningful answers. While NLP isn’t an easy feat for any chatbot, it’s a critical part of any business that wants to provide superior customer service.

Adding authoritative sources can make your chatbot even more useful. Quora, Yahoo Answers and other question-and-answer websites are great places to find questions that customers ask frequently. You can also add rephrased versions of common questions to teach your chatbot how to recognize different phrasing and offer the correct information. This makes your chatbot more useful and reduces the number of times it needs to be trained by a human.

Collecting utterances

A chatbot that uses natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning can spot patterns in human speech and automatically identify the best response without requiring human intervention. These bots can help you save time and improve your productivity, but they are only as good as the data they have access to.

Adding sources can help you train your chatbot to understand what users mean when they ask questions. This is a great way to improve your bot’s performance, especially for complex commands. For example, a rules-based chatbot will not be able to answer a request like “Which artist wrote the song ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’?”

Many chatbot-building platforms allow you to connect your AI with external knowledge bases. These can be as simple as Knowledgebase articles or more detailed as reports created specifically from your business data.

Training

Training a chatbot on your own data can improve its performance. However, the process can be complex and requires a lot of time. Fortunately, it is possible to automate the process of collecting, curating, and refining data for optimal results.

It’s important to train your chatbot on a variety of data sources to ensure it can handle different input prompts and responses. This will help the chatbot provide accurate and relevant information to users. It will also make it easier for the chatbot to understand user requests and provide them with a high-quality experience.

Once you have the necessary data, it’s time to begin the training process. It’s best to start with a defined business problem that your chatbot will solve. This will ensure that the bot is built to serve your business effectively. It’s also a good idea to involve multiple people in the training process. This will prevent the chatbot from becoming too biased toward a specific team or group of people.