Seaborne trade, one of civilization’s oldest customs, has grown steadily over the last decade as global trade has flourished. The digital transformation of retail and wholesale business has revolutionized international commerce. But behind the point, click and order façade, logistics companies and transportation authorities are scrambling to manage demand for both speed and volume. At the same time national and international regulators are requiring seaports to mitigate the impact of congestion, pollution and other environmental effects created by crowded ports.
Seaports have become a focal point for improvement. While countries can build new roads to move more trucks or add tracks to carry more trains, seaports are different. Limited by geography and bounded by urban development, seaports in many countries are straining to manage the flow of goods. Ships are not only arriving more often, but they’re also bigger. Super max cargo ships can overwhelm port facilities by delivering tens of thousands of containers at once. Moving containers out by truck, one or two at a time is slow, adds to urban congestion and has an adverse environmental impact. Thousands of containers end up spending days, weeks or even months waiting to be picked up for transport inland. Compounding the issue is the need to perform customs inspections and clearance at the seaport.
To overcome these challenges, governments, shippers and port authorities are beginning to shift their perspective on seaports. Commerce has changed and so the port must change along with it. It’s time to liberate the port community from the harbor that established it, by redefining the essence of what a “port” is and does.
Government officials demand that all inbound and outbound ships are authorized at the seaport and that all paperwork and inspections are completed before cargo is removed from the seaport. This can result in waterside storage that leads to a backlog. If administrative tasks — reviewing paperwork, inspecting cargo, collecting taxes or duties – could be done inland, the “commercial port” could be freed from the harbor, provided that cargoes would remain intact and containers undisturbed and secure.
Digital transformation and the dry port
Developing inland ports, also known as dry ports or freight villages, addresses some of the logistical issues and creates new opportunities. Inland ports can be built in areas unconstrained by geographic features that limit size or access. Shifting container storage to inland ports reduces the burden on geographically limited seaports, thereby increasing the volume of containers the port can handle. Inland ports also offer more efficient access for intermodal transport systems. And the reduction of overland traffic in and out of seaports substantially reduces environmental impact and creates new urban renewal and development opportunities.
The digital transformation of the commercial port is the catalyst to using the inland port innovation to liberate the port community from the harbor. The process of digitally transforming the seaport into a digital port happens in four steps. The first step is achieved by developing a controlled customs corridor: a secure, digitally monitored and managed route that ensures everything unloaded from a ship arrives in the same state at the inland port. The same applies to shipments consolidated at the inland port bound for ships leaving the seaport. This development would eliminate the need for seaports to store containers, freeing up critical space to expand port operations while reducing urban congestion.
The second step is to deploy a cloud-based intermodal appointment system that is intelligently aware of the status of cargo, the roads and rails, as well as both planned and unplanned events that might disrupt transportation. Providing truck, rail and maritime carriers with more precise information about cargo arrival and departure times would result in a major improvement to time-definite delivery. In addition, a system for managing pick-up appointments will greatly increase the efficiency of cargo movement between inland and sea ports. Lastly, drivers and trucks can be cleared ahead of time and parking spaces preassigned, reducing the paperwork to be completed and speeding the movement of trucks through the ports.
The third step is to virtualize and manage the dry port and seaport as one entity — The Commercial Port. Transportation hubs like airports operate as an ecosystem with multiple independent entities working as one. Similarly, seaports and inland ports need to operate as a single entity supported by an intermodal appointment system and controlled customs corridor, to ensure that both locations know exactly where cargo is located and coordinate its movement into and out of the ports.
The fourth and last step is to automate and facilitate the ability of rail companies to efficiently shunt cargo between the seaport and inland port with minimal human interaction. For all the flexibility trucks offer in the movement of freight, the volume of cargo moving in and out of seaports calls for a solution that can handle a larger capacity with greater efficiency and lower environmental impact. The implementation of a smart rail cargo management system between the seaport and inland port reduces the negative aspects of truck traffic on the seaport, while applying the flexibility of trucks on the inland side. This makes best use of loading and unloading labor, as well as reduces the footprint of the port. The digital transformation of the commercial port returns the harbor to the city so it can be reclaimed for tourism, recreation and environmental stewardship.
The ancient Phoenicians and Greeks, builders of the first international seaport system, would surely be awed by today’s technologies and the scale of port operations. But the idea of increasing operational efficiencies of the port ecosystem through innovation and cooperation is something they would readily grasp. After all, good business is good business — in any age.
Airports face a number of challenges — aging infrastructure, fluctuating demand, sophisticated security needs and, now, an unexpected global health crisis — and legacy technologies are incapable of addressing them. In other words, we cannot expect to build tomorrow’s airport using yesterday’s solutions. We need radical innovation and that calls for new technologies. Digital twin fits the bill.
A digital twin is a 3D representation of the physical world. It enables developers to visualize products and spaces and to run simulations to show how they behave in differing conditions. Here are the five main areas where a digital twin can benefit airports:
1. Ideation
Airports are continuously seeking ideas on how to transform from physical infrastructure into real, living ecosystems. That means improving the passenger journey, and one way to do that involves creating 3D virtual experiences to simulate new concepts and validate their benefits; if they prove promising, the 3D virtual experiences can be used to demonstrate value to the airport stakeholders that are responsible for securing capital funding. Building stakeholder confidence early on ensures that investments will be used wisely and can radically shorten decision cycles from years to weeks.
2. Design and Engineering
A digital twin provides a collaborative environment to unite all supplier deliverables around a unique 3D mockup to converge much faster on a final design. The subcontractor’s design conditions and physical dimensions can then be verified and validated. The conformance of the final 3D design to initial requirements and FAA regulations can be readily shown. Tenants will benefit from a more controlled process and can achieve on-plan, on-cost and on-time delivery.
3. Construction
By leveraging a digital twin, project delivery teams can simulate how construction or renovations might impact airport operations. The overall operational impact of taking major infrastructure – such as a terminal – out of service, can be simulated. Once evaluated, an effective and proactive operational plan can then be put in place to minimize disruption.
4. Sales and Marketing
Digital twin also opens up many opportunities for innovative marketing. For instance, new and engaging AR and VR applications (perhaps virtual shopping experiences) could be developed to entertain travelers and drive retail revenue. And digital twin could enable marketers to test new and innovative marketing concepts in a virtual environment before committing to them. Moreover, employing digital twin can reduce the need for real photo shoots and costly film sets usually involved in marketing campaigns.
5. Operations
When it comes to airport operations, there are two primary roles for digital twin technology:
Maintenance: Digital twin provides a platform to monitor and analyze sensor information to predict asset failure. Further, it provides a diagnostic tool by simulating what went wrong. All this information is captured and communicated in 3D to the field via a work order to accelerate investigation and reduce maintenance costs.
Passenger Flow: 3D simulation provides a better understanding of daily operations. It gives a holistic view on how planning interacts with airport activities such as construction, renovation or other events which may cause irregular operations. Mitigation scenarios can be simulated to address the impacts and shorten recovery times. This reduces costs and, turn-around times and, most importantly, helps to eliminate congested passenger flows. For this to work effectively, it is imperative that the virtual model provides a reasonable and trustworthy representation of a real-life scenario.
The airport of tomorrow
Digital twin is being used in other industries – to support the development of autonomous driving technology, for example – and delivering value and return. Airports that similarly embrace digital twin have much to gain – improving their ability to innovate for the future by encapsulating an airport’s overall environment and life cycle in a virtual environment. In an industry faced with unprecedented challenges, digital twin technology – a highly visual way of modeling, thinking and doing business – will help transform and deliver the airport of tomorrow.
Design is a roadmap or a strategic approach for someone to achieve a unique expectation – Wiki
I agree Design is strategic, purposeful and always aims to solve problems. A good Design creates a strong impact on users. Brilliant work catches your attention, keeps you engaged and stays in your memory. Just think of something that has caught your attention and forced you to read; do you recall some comic strips, cartoons, animation, sketches, illustrations in trolls?
Yes, the power of Visual Story Telling always has an edge and plays a crucial role in unfolding a story. There are many forms used like pictures, videos, animations, sketches. And that’s when a visual story telling medium comes to picture. Of course there are photographs that can convey your message. But are they versatile like Illustrations?
Users connect with illustrated narratives faster and more easily. So, who is your favourite super hero? From print the trend has gone viral and now digital platform is witnessing all forms of it some static and others in motion. Designers now are creating websites that use full-screen illustrations to custom made icons to personify brands, identities and provide that USP. Even highly technical and data driven websites can be made extremely lively and interactive yet commune the brand message as strongly as ever before and custom illustrations is the most fun and engaging way to do so.
The major misconception most people have is using illustrations as synonymous to beautification or to support but in reality it is Design in itself; a tool that can magically combine beautification and clean concepts.
It is no surprise that it’s taking over the web and mobile applications. Mood, style and theme of the websites can be set and unlike photographs, they can mesh reality and imagination and present you with an extra-ordinary design. With illustrations you become the king of your own wonderland with powers to create anything and everything to best convey your message, be it a dog floating in the space, a talking owl or a superman delivery boy; absolutely anything that hits your imagination. Little creativity, color and compelling illustrations are sure to change a website’s identity.
Illustrations have lot of technicalities attached to it also. While the illustration may have depths of complexity, the overall message should be simple. Like any other design, even illustrations undergo layers and layers of stages, from the rough sketches to vector outlines, to colors to depth and composition.
Color is a powerful tool in illustration because it can change mood – the mood of the user. Imagine a website has power to improve our state of mind and thereby it strengthens our relationship with a brand. And, if the colors are taken from the brand’s logo, the illustrations becomes a part of the brand’s identity. And, introducing more complimentary colors or gradients will add to its vibrancy. Texture brings more depth to the illustration, a simple halftone texture or a grainy grunge texture creates a nice effect to the flat illustration.
Today we spot illustrations mostly on a banner of the website or around the section that seeks to explain the usage of product/ services. The trend in mobile mainly focuses on splash and on-boarding screens. People also use lot of subtle animations to enliven the whole website/ applications. The animations are usually done using animated GIFs. A customized icon with svg animation is now a trend in UI interaction. The delicate use of animation in illustration just gives the site that extra dash of awesomeness for that memorable experience. There are different Illustration and icon styles used in websites and mobile applications, more leaned towards flat design. Few common styles include line drawings, filled color, hand drawn, low poly, Geometric, isometric and 3D.
Travelling gives you wisdom and experience that is beyond words and I am extremely lucky to have been able to tour to various parts of the world, though, most of it has been work related; Lollypop has made me explore European and Western world mostly to meet either new clients or catch up with the old ones. And, this time I feel like I have struck a jackpot – Vietnam!
This city has energy and vibes that is so enthralling that you have to take a step back and let the moment sink in. It’s fascinating how this place has witnessed endless battles, survived worst of the times and yet is one of the south-east Asia’s fastest-growing economies. Honestly, humans and economies never fail to appal me, Vietnam, labelled as a third world (by Western Economy) has fought three decades of bitter wars against them itself to gain independence. It just took me mere FOUR days, to have an absolute new outlook of this country. I have gained an unparalleled respect and love for this country. The constant urge to explore and discover this city made me dig a bit further and I have broken this article into 3 parts that amused me the most – City, People and of course Design.
CITY – Ho Chi Minh
Fresh and sparkling; it just makes you fall in love with it. Though, it is 10 times poorer than India, it is way cleaner and better. I have nothing against my country but I have to mention this here because really it’s just about individual’s efforts and attitude that speaks for one’s country and we Indians need to learn this. Another amazing thing about this beauty is BIKES, I personally am a biker by heart and it was an unusual experience to realize that Bike here is the basic medium of travel with no social tags. Be it rich or poor everyone is on bike, there is absolutely no concept of classic, sports or adventure bikes, A Bike is A Bike, simple and plain. And, yes the best way to discover this city is to hop on a “Bike Taxi”.
Next thing that leaves you gaped is the Food; it is just everywhere for dirt cheap. You can gobble all the food you need for less than a quarter and I am talking about healthy, good and nutritious food, now that is what I call a heaven! The city has developed much beyond my expectations and I even heard that everyone is developing a good traffic sense. Unfortunately, during my travel it was raining and I had to travel mostly on taxi which was bit expensive.
PEOPLE
A country is made of its people and the beauty of Vietnam equally reflects in its masses. The warmth and welcoming nature of everyone leaves a never fading smile on your face. There is a massive difference between Bangkok & Vietnam; Vietnamese are extremely soft, welcoming and warm hearted. But, the challenge here is of language and communication as not many are well versed with English and one can get stuck if you are outside the city limits. City thrives on service driven attitude and people love their 9 to 5 jobs with 2 hours of break; yes! 2 hours, 1 for food and another for quick power nap. They believe in moving with the flow and have little appetite for innovation. However, when you interact with locals, the keenness to learn and grow throws you off guard and you feel as if you are in a diamond mine, surrounded by precious gemstones.
DESIGN & IT
The best designers are generally rooted in the artists and Vietnamese art has a long and rich history, the earliest examples of which date back as far as the Stone Age. They are amazing when it comes to art and it is wonderful to discover how they are exploring new arenas of branching out; few have opted for print and animation but majority of them have chosen digital design. I was lucky enough to meet few designers and phew, saw some real exceptional work! The most marvellous thing was to know that all designers there knew UI Development by default; an artist turned designer with technical know-how, now that is what I call a master stroke. Here are some of the design samples from the designers I met:
1) This Designer here is amazing visualizer and perfect with design tools, the only challenge was communication gap.
2) This one blew me away! Literally, think of anything that is related to design and she knows it all; an amazing artist, designer, animator and brilliant communicator. One of the jewels, I was talking about.
Though, designs and designers had great impact on me, one thing that did offset me a bit and that was lack of individuality and their own identity; the designs there are predominantly influenced by Western world. However, the willingness of Designers to explore this part of the world given the right opportunity has my hope pinned.
To conclude my experience, all I can say is that a little guidance now to these emerging designing sensations will most definitely take world by design storm. And, I am extremely glad to be discovering them at an early stage. And, I am definitely over-whelmed to realize that Designers around the globe are realizing their worth and they know this is there era.
The modern-day business world has found a number of uses for chatbots. From increasing the user engagement count to play a major part in the lead conversion process, chatbots have entered the world across industries. The fact that chatbots are equally famous among baby boomers and millennials, increases the user base of the technology to a great extent. Seeing the business benefits and the flourishing market size, there are a number of businesses that are looking forward to launching their chatbots, both for their own app and for others to use. In this article, we will be looking at how much it costs to build a chatbot and everything surrounding the transformative technology. But before we get into cost benefit analysis of chatbot part, let us first look into what the flourishing chatbot market looks like.
Chatbot Market
Within the past one decade, chatbots have witnessed an unprecedented demand from a number of industries around the globe, including logistics and on-demand. What was earlier restricted to only eCommerce has now shifted to a number of other domains ever since the advent of mobile apps. All this has been the doing of growing inclusion of growing level AI in customer experience.
By the time we reach 2024, the market size of Chatbots would have increased to $1.34 Billion – a number that is driven by the inception of disruptive technologies like Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in the chatbot mechanism.
From the simplistic rules specific chatbots developed to manage uncomplicated queries to cloud-based self-learning bots that are designed to understand the user intent and automatically modify the output, chatbots, no matter how learned or simple are being used extensively in fields like eCommerce, Healthcare, etc. via business data integration.
The fact that chatbots have proved themselves to be this useful in the world, has prepared them to contribute $1250 million by 2025.
Seeing the market share that chatbots hold, one thing is clear – Chatbots are going to be a very prominent part of businesses across industries. And why not, after all, the business benefits that they have to offer are unmatched and unparalleled.
Talking of business benefits of Chatbots, let us look at what they are before we move on to the chatbot development cost.
Business Benefits of Chatbots
It is invalid to ask the question ‘How much does it cost to build a chatbot’ until you are convinced that they are needed.
Besides the obvious benefit of making your business a 24*7 business, Chatbots, no matter how much you pay in the name of chatbot development life cycle, come with a number of advantages that are known to lower the cost of business operation, which tend to unnecessarily tend to close the gap between gain and loss numbers in the balance sheet. All aimed at changing your business growth story.
Here’s what they are:
A report by Juniper Research validates that the cost of building a chatbot is going to be a much smaller amount in front of the costs that chatbots are all set to cut down – $8 Billion on a yearly basis – by the time we reach 2022.
Let’s see how:-
Lowered operational cost
The biggest operational cost in businesses is around the number of incoming calls. By giving the visitors answers to what they are looking for, chatbots are able to save on the cost associated with the increasing call volumes and in fact the whole interaction volume.
In addition to this, when users call businesses after having the preliminary level of interaction with a chatbot, the time of customer care executive that would go behind answering the first level interaction gets lowered to a huge extent.
Cut down labor expense
In a report, McKinsey estimated that around 29% of customer service position in the US can get automated via a properly designed chatbot. The fact that chatbots can interact with multiple people at the same time, hints at a time where the customer engagement industry would be dominated by chatbots.
In addition to this, businesses who have employed chatbot in their customer service program know how chatbot implementation costs much lower than the annual salary of an employee while doing twice their work.
Cost effective 24*7 availability
Modern-day customers expect businesses to be available 24*7 to answer their queries at all hours. The fact that a number of businesses are still not able to function on a 24*7 mode has not just made them lose on to prospective sales but also has affected customer loyalty to a great extent.
But when you employ a chatbot that has been designed to answer to the customer requirement in the off hours when your customer rep is not available, you make them more receptive towards your business, altering your brand image 180 degrees.
Better resource allocation
When the customer representative doesn’t have a list of customers to attend to and knows that even in their absence their customers will be handled with equal attentiveness through a chatbot, they are able to concentrate on devising strategies on keeping the users hooked and finding ways to help chatbot close more leads.
This way, chatbots prevent sales reps from falling into the cycle of mundane work and monotonous job cycle, giving them the opportunity to keep learning.
Greater revenue
There are a number of businesses that have been using Chatbots for lead conversion and greater sales. Through chatbots, you can keep alerting your customers of the discount opportunities and increase the engagement and upsell count.
Along with making a business a sales conversion magnet, chatbots help create a strong brand awareness when integrated with social media messenger platforms.
Increased customer engagement
It’s vital to keep your clients involved with your brand. As indicated by companies, organizations that involve with their customers through social media were able to increase the user spend by 20% to 40%. While social media is doing its work, chatbots can contribute by making customer engagement interactive and easy.
Monitoring consumer data & gaining insights
As you already know that chatbots are great devices and tools to chat with customers. With the input they gather through basic inquiries, you can make improvements on your administrations/products and even upgrade your website by adjusting low converting pages. For instance, if your landing page creates a decent measure of organic traffic but doesn’t convert well, your chatbot can contact customers visiting the page with a study to gather more data on why they are leaving the page without buying or making action and so forth.
The chatbot benefits are equal among all the different types of bots. No matter what type your chatbot gets categorized the benefits mentioned above will hold true for them all.
Speaking of types, let us look at the different Chatbot types that are most commonly employed by businesses across the world.
Type of chatbots
When we look into the types of chatbots, we have to look at both – the Superset and the Subset wise demarcation of Chatbot development type, having elements that goes into interactive chatbot development.
The supersets
There are two categories of chatbots that you can invest in.
Bots Implemented in Own App – These chatbots work inside a mobile app which performs a specific function for the sake of automating the interaction happening between the app and the user.
Bots which Function Within Messenger – These chatbots stay in messengers which support bot interaction. These work best for businesses that do not have a standalone app or wish to keep social media at the center of the business model.
The Subsets
Within the prime categories of the chatbot mentioned above, there are a number of chatbot types that you can get made –
FAQ chatbot – A basic QnA or FAQ Bot provides its users with automated responses to frequently asked questions in a natural, intuitive question-and-answer conversational style.
Conversational chatbot – The chatbot type uses language understanding services to have easy flowing conversations with the end users. They are usually made to A. collect the basic information about the users and B. keep them engaged till a human customer care executive is online.
Transactional chatbot – These are the chatbots that help the app users to inquire into and buy something off the app without ever talking to a human customer care representative.
Predictive Chatbot – These chatbots are the most advanced ones in the market at this time. They are developed and designed on a case by case scenario. By incorporating heavy machine learning in them, businesses use predictive chatbots to analyze how users might react next.
Irrespective of what type your chatbot belongs to, the elements that go into it are all the same. Something we will be attending to, next.
MVP Chatbot Features
Conversation
Conversation, one of the primary needs and features of chatbot should be based on a fundamental principle. In the basic principle, the request for messages ought to be logical and comprehensive for each customer. For example, when a customer asks about the contact number of your organization, the chatbot should tell the user just a number. If it informs about the address, it implies that the entire rationale is broken.
What’s more is that, ensure that your chatbot doesn’t commit grammatical errors and follows the overall pace of the discussion. Keep an official discussion tone in case you’re focusing on business people. If the task is somewhat hard for you, it’s smarter to hire a freelancer to produce content for the messages.
Payment system
This feature suits e-commerce chatbots. If your bot’s main goal is to boost sales and create new distribution channels, you should take care of at least one payment method. This is the point for you to choose between the third-party system or a custom payment solution.
A well-designed payment system eases the flow of the payment security and allows to analyze the payment and customer behavior. What’s more is that you don’t need to stress over expenses that are generally charged by third-party systems. Regardless of advantages, the expense of a custom payment framework is excessively high. That is the reason why most of the small organizations execute services such as PayPal, Braintree, Stripe, and others.
Geolocation
Online mapping is another helpful feature for a chatbot to attract new customers by pinpointing the area of your business on the map. For instance, users can request the bot to help them navigate to the restaurant or street they’ve never been to. Google Maps Platform permits you to make this feature with zero effort. All things considered, it draws customers to visit your place.
If we take an example of food delivery, then this feature is the best. All that your users need to do is to place an order using the chatbot, make payment through an integrated payment gateway, share the location with the delivery personnel, and enjoy the food after arrival.
Personal touch
The personal touch is more about the personality and character than the technologies. Mentioning users by their name rather than pronouns, elevates their feelings and emotions. The personal mentality to every customer ensures increased brand loyalty and positive input about your chatbot.
To make a remarkable and unique chatbot, you can utilize the knowledge of a brand expert. In case you’re on a tight budget, you can always bring into play your imagination and creativity.
Account synchronization
The first use case of account synchronization that rings a bell is redeeming rewards. If there is a promo system, then the users have some awards or bonuses from the past purchases, which users can spend during further purchase. Nonetheless, if the chatbot isn’t synchronized with the website, it doesn’t display the rewards. Thus, you need to ensure that your platforms have a typical database that continually shares data with one another.
A synchronized record permits you to carry out efficient marketing campaigns. Whenever there’s a discount or sale on a product from the customer’s wish list, the chatbot sends a warning about it. This methodology is more successful than promotional e-mails and messages.
The Composition Required to Build a Chatbot
There are a number of components and chatbot design strategies that come together to develop a chatbot that goes on to revolutionize the customer experience that a business offers, all coming as an addition in the breakdown of chatbot pricing models.
Before acquiring the knowledge of building a chatbot, let’s have a look at the image that describes the working of it.
As a business who is looking to partner with an agency that excels in chatbot development services, you should look at their approach in the context of all these components before making any decision.
Backend
Chatbots need a backend to manage messages coming in from different channels and to process them with NLP offerings like Api.ai, LUIS, or Wit.ai. The backend also holds business logic and integration within the current systems and is used to develop conversational intelligence on the basis of which conversation happens with the end users.
Channels
After your backend is set up, you will have to create the endpoints for the integration with every specific channel. While every single channel integration is different, they mostly follow the same method of endpoint set up in the backend for the purpose of sending and getting messages which rely on the access token authorization. Also, you will have to implement the channel-specific user interface in places like quick reply, visual cards which guide users during a conversation.
NLP
The moment you receive messages from a specific channel, you are going to use NLP services like Luis, Api.ai, and Wit.ai for extracting the entities and intents out of the user message. While the set up of NLP service and processing of messages with the help of SDK is pretty direct, training the NLP entities and entities which might be present in an external system is not an easy task. You will have to understand the entities which map to specific objects which exist in systems like Contacts, Products, or Employees. You will also have to implement business logic validation on the extracted data which can range from simple validation to custom.
Conversational intelligence
This is the most complicated component of the whole chatbot development process. You will have to design intelligent conversations on the basis of NLP entities and intents – something that is not easy. To achieve a stage where you build an intelligent chatbot, you will have to create an algorithm for every single conversation and navigation so that users can start from scratch. You will have to make use of decision trees, slot based algos, state workflows, or other deep learning methodologies for controlling the conversation.
Integration
Because of prime purpose of your chatbot is the execution of processes like booking appointments, buying products, ordering items, etc. you will have to integrate the chatbot in an existing mobile application. Integration here will involve factors like business logic rules and validations, the persistence of data which would be required as a part of the business process.
Now that we have looked at the different components that come together to make a chatbot, it is time to attend to the things that matter to you on a more intricate level – the time it would take to develop a chatbot and the cost of chatbot development, in accordance with the different metrics that chatbots are evaluated on.
The time it takes to develop a Chatbot from scratch
A very important part of the whole chatbot app development process for businesses and an answer to the cost of chatbot development is knowing how much time it is going to take for chatbot app development company to develop them so that they get a rough idea of when to start witnessing unprecedented customer satisfaction graphs.
Well, here’s an answer to the hours it would take to develop a bot, something that will have a direct impact on your chatbot cost –
Integration with an app – the duration of it depends on the chatbot complexity, but usually it takes up 40-56 hours. Development of communication interface
Command language user interpreter takes up somewhere around 40-56 hours.
Natural language user interface takes somewhere around 120-160 hours.
Business logic
Adaptation of an existing business logic, takes up 120-160 hours, depending on the amount of logic.
Development of business logic from scratch takes around 160-192 hours.
Since you now know the approximate hours it would take to attend to different parts of chatbot development, it is time to translate those hours into the cost of chatbot development.
Decreasing the Chatbot development Cost
There are a number of aspects that increase the price of chatbot development. But there are also the option to stabilize the financial impact like the chatbot development tools that save time for developers and decrease the eventual final cost.
Third-party platforms
Developing a chatbot from the scratch without any preparation is quite expensive. Thus, to solve this people generally use third party platforms. With the assistance of these popular platforms, you can make a chatbot with less efforts and time.
Despite the fact that these platforms guarantee rapid development, they also provide flexibility and adaptability which lets the developer use them often.
Some of the common and popular chatbot platforms are:
Chatfuel
Botsify
Dialogflow
BotPress
Mobile Monkey
How Much Does It Cost To Develop a Chatbot? – The Exact Chatbot Development Cost
Now that we have seen all – The market of chatbots, benefits that they have to offer, types of chatbots that are presently ruling the world, and the components that come together to develop them along with the time it takes to develop chatbots, it is now time to look at how much it is going to cost you.
Seeing the work that goes into developing a chatbot, the approximate chatbot cost that comes for development of your bot is in the range of $25,000 to $30,000.The cost range includes the design, development, and integration part of the whole chatbot development framework.
With this, we have now seen all – the benefits of chatbots, features and components that helps to devise a well-structured chatbot, the market size, the type and the cost you will have to pay to get your chatbot developed, the only thing left for you to do here is to get in touch with our chatbot developers and avail the best chatbot app development company in USA.
You have your eye on a new piece of security technology or service and you want to evaluate it before deciding whether to commit to the effort of a full deployment. Alternatively, you may already be committed to full-scale deployment but wondering where to start. So where should you deploy it first to test it most effectively and have the greatest impact?
Human nature, caution and conventional wisdom dictate that you should put it in a lab environment or in a low-importance section of your network. That is sensible, isn’t it? The change board will give you less hassle and if there is a problem, you are going to get less flack, aren’t you?
But will that approach give you most information and practical experience about the new system’s deployment difficulties, effectiveness in your environment and what it will detect? Will it give you the maximum protection as soon as possible?
Any tool that gives you fresh insight on the behavior of your systems tends to find something interesting. Those of us who have deployed such things have the stories to go with them – from mundane discoveries such as finding that all servers in one network had the wrong DNS settings and were thus being slowed down, to critical detections of previously unobserved persistent attackers.
However, there is an argument to be made for deploying this new tool on your production systems, close to your crown jewels. These are the things you really want to protect and the environment in which it really needs to work. Yes, this approach is higher risk, but it is also higher benefit. Will a deployment on a low throughput, obscure bit of network really tell you much? On the other hand, couldn’t one real detection on your primary systems during the evaluation period convince you and your management of the system’s value?
Granted, this may not be a sensible suggestion for inline systems that process all traffic, but with the right technology it can work. Many security technologies monitor traffic and provide alerts rather than enforce actions — or at least they have a mode in which they can act in this way. A new security solution deployed on a span port or network tap may actually pose more risk to production traffic in terms of confidentiality than in disruption or performance. It is also easy to turn off or detach such solutions by removing the span connection. Other security tools rely on collecting logs from your existing devices. Building an architecture that allows forking and diverting the streams of log events can support easy introduction of such types of new security tooling.
As an example, consider the evaluation of a new security monitoring tool, perhaps one with user and entity behaviour analytics (UEBA). Will you get much information from deploying it on a test/staging environment that will typically have a small number of users and occasional traffic? Or would you get a better sense of its value from connecting it to your production active directory, primary applications and remote access system? Wouldn’t that give you a better idea of how easily it can be connected, how well it copes with actual production loads and whether it can really differentiate between normal and suspicious behaviour?
Designing taps such as those mentioned above into your network and log architectures future-proofs your environment, making it easier to evaluate other products down the road and deploy them into final production. It can also help in emergencies, as incident response teams wishing to deploy their tooling will be looking for very similar facilities overseeing your most critical systems.
So next time you have a new security system to test, think about ignoring conventional wisdom and throwing (some) caution to the wind. Sometimes the radical step is the right one. Deploying security tools on your crown jewels first may be the optimal approach.
There has been a long-held assumption that data security threats originate from nefarious external forces seeking to steal an organization’s most sensitive data. Traditional security models were therefore designed with this view in mind and on the mistaken belief that everything within the internal network is trustworthy. But there is evidence that a majority of attacks come from internal sources, with healthcare, manufacturing and financial services firms at the greatest risk.
An insider threat may be intentional or accidental but, in either case, the risk can be that much greater because it is often difficult to detect and can continue to spread.
In healthcare, having electronic health records (EHRs) that collect a patient’s data in a single record is hugely beneficial to managing patient care and to patients’ ability to gain insights into their overall health and manage their own care. Securing sensitive data is of paramount importance to prevent data theft, identity theft and reputational damage to the provider. Therefore, access must be secure and accountable, regardless of whether the data resides on hospital servers, mobile devices or cloud services.
As the healthcare industry continues to digitize — bringing together EHR data with other data about the patient, including from smart devices — and as it shifts to care without borders, interoperability of data will become even more crucial, but so too will cyber resilience. Organizations will need to focus on hardening access to digital assets as opposed to making them inaccessible.
In an era of patient-driven care, patients expect to be able to trust those caring for them to safeguard their data. Violation of that trust with security breaches affects the quality of care those patients receive. If a reputable hospital suffers a breach, it will influence where a patient will go for care, which could affect the continuity and quality of care.
This is where the security approach known as zero trust comes into its own. With zero trust, there is no assumed trust of corporate devices or networks versus untrusted public networks or personal devices. The same security checks are performed on users and devices. Everybody is equally suspect, but everybody is also equally enabled to gain the access they need. Access policies are applied wherever data is held and across the interfaces of all systems when they are being accessed.
Such a system might sound onerous to operate, but zero trust is not about putting roadblocks on innovation, collaboration and open exchange. Rather, it’s about increasing cyber defense.
In healthcare, zero trust is about finding a solution that can preserve the sharing and giving of information in a patient’s best interest but that will safeguard the information at the same time. The zero trust approach does just that and is a viable option to support digital healthcare.
To achieve the objectives of data security through a zero trust approach, healthcare organizations need to consider three key elements.
Ensure that zero trust encompasses security at multiple levels. Applications need to be subject to strict login and monitoring rules and complete API security. This is one way an application can be executed, and these interfaces are vulnerable to attacks unless they are properly protected. The network must have strong security measures, such as physical segmentation and firewalls, plus security monitoring across all users and IT systems. Multilevel security programs should also address training for staff and patients to spot phishing attempts and practice good security hygiene, such as setting strong passwords. And the infrastructure needs to monitor all users logged into the overall system. Patients who read reports that their hospital is being investigated for security breaches will choose to go elsewhere. Once a hospital’s reputation is damaged, the stigma is hard to overcome.
Ensure that all patient data and resources are accessed securely with the appropriate permissions. Knowing where data is held allows controls to be extended to wrap and protect data on-premises, in the cloud and on personal devices. Once the data is classified, the correct access policies can be enforced when that data is being accessed. Healthcare organizations need to be able to audit who has accessed information to ensure accountability.
Have in place a “least access” strategy through an identity and access management solution, and grant access only to people authorized to access data. For example, if a physician is allowed to access a patient record, only that physician should be able to do so, not other clinical staff involved in caring for the patient. The objective is to ensure that the hospital is running an environment with the proper protection in place. Zero trust needs to be ingrained in human resources policies. Since hospitals typically have a large temporary workforce and a lot of personnel changes, the identity management system can automate safeguards to identify new employees and those moving into different roles or leaving the organization. So, if a nurse or doctor leaves the hospital, that person’s authorized access will be automatically revoked.
The patients’ trust and confidence in the healthcare system rely on healthcare organizations being able to safeguard their data and ensure that it is only used legitimately. Trust drives all consumers’ experiences in terms of whom they engage with. And in an era of patient-centered care, patients expect their hospital or clinician to also care for their personal data.
Continuous delivery yields a host of IT and operational benefits, including proven competitive advantages like faster deployment times, responses to customer feedback, and bug fixes. But one aspect that tends not to make it on the marquee list of benefits — and should probably be headlining it — is security.
It’s really quite simple — with continuous delivery, cruical security enhancementst, updates and fixes to applications can be pushed live in a quick and timely manner to get the enhanced security into deployment. What could be better than that?
Traditional slow and batch-oriented waterfall approach
Typically, in the traditional ITSM approach, when a security incident happens, it is captured and consolidated with other requirements to be addressed in the next application release. Sometimes an urgent patch release can be delivered sooner, in a few weeks – if it can rapidly progress through the cycle of fix, regression testing, release preparation, release testing and maintenance. But if the fix requires a major release, it could be many months until it can be made available, and in most cases, the only thing you can do in the meantime is document the incidents.
That’s too slow.
A better, faster way — continuous delivery and DevSecOps
A modern service management approach combining continuous delivery and DevSecOps supports the core tenets of information security: data confidentiality, integrity, and availability. A dedicated team provides continuous delivery by making small or incremental changes every day or multiple times a day. DevSecOps secures the continuous integration and delivery pipeline, as well as the content that’s coming through that pipeline.
You gain three key advantages:
Speed. Continuous delivery and DevSecOps dramatically improve security because they allow malicious attacks and bugs to be addressed as soon as they’re identified, not just added to some logbook. And in many cases, the window for action falls from between six and eight weeks down to minutes. Thus, far fewer incidents become problems that impact IT and business operations.
Consistency. IT teams working under traditional ITSM often worry that the continuous delivery and DevSecOps approach will create more opportunity for mistakes and bugs because more changes are happening more often. In practice, the exact opposite is true.
Flexibility. A DevSecOps approach simplifies the introduction of blue/green canary releases — implementing a new release while continuing to operate the prior release — into your delivery capacity. This allows you to redirect modest amounts of traffic to your new release, facilitating the identification of potential issues without drastically impacting many users. It also lets you rapidly shift all traffic back to the current release should a problem be identified.
The modern approach offers a variety of powerful tactics for quickly countering attacks. For example, workloads can be designed to move between cloud providers using Pivotal Cloud Foundry, containers or other homogenizing technology that offers the flexibility to move systems from one cloud provider to another. If there is a big denial of service attack in one provider, you could redeploy to another provider or back to a private data center with the click of a button. If an attack is focused on a particular IP, you recreate the environment at a new IP and block the other one completely. Structuring applications in this kind of push-button deployment mode creates opportunities for all sorts of similar scenarios.
How to move forward
Realizing the security benefits that come from implementing continuous integration and DevSecOps may require a deep, cultural change in the way your company builds and delivers software. Increasingly, security will become a secondary competency of developers, with risk ownership devolving from the central security team to application owners. In this new mode of operating, we need to make sure the right guard rails are in place and that the central security team provides necessary mentorship and support.
It’s a challenge, no question. But worth the rewards.
Successfully navigating some of these changes is explored in a recent post called “How to jump start your enterprise digital transformation.” A seven-page paper, DevSecOps: Why security is essential, is another good resource.
As organizations focus on data-driven business models to remain competitive, they will increasingly seek to collaborate with partners and exchange data. Data shared in an ecosystem is more valuable than data locked in a silo because it leads to new innovations and customer experiences. This trend is playing out in many industries including transportation, logistics, energy, manufacturing, healthcare, telecommunications and financial services. The effort of maintaining countless data repositories has made data acquisition very expensive, causing a drag on the overall competitiveness of an industry, not to mention the additional burden of adherence to the General Data Protection Regulation and personally identifiable information standards with respect to handling personal data. In the case of autonomous cars, for example, there is so much data to be had — and so much needed — that pooling it makes sense to get a sufficient amount for R&D in as timely and cost-effective a manner as possible. This moves the entire industry forward. Through a combination of internet of things, artificial intelligence, and distributed ledger technology (DLT) we will see auto manufacturers, fleet operators, OEMs and end users willing to share and exchange data as digitized assets through data marketplaces, enabling the players to benefit from new offerings based on the transparency and monetization of shared data.
Shifting from cars to mobility services
In the automotive industry, the market is shifting from selling cars to providing mobility services. A DLT-based system, combined with self-sovereign identity, makes it straightforward to build a mobility ecosystem where it’d be easy to enable new ways to engage with customers and partners, leveraging trusted and safe data exchange. For example, make it simple for customers to get the best deal on car financing (no need to re-enter their personal details to get approval at each dealership). Make customer interactions seamless by having customer history (i.e., loyalty data) immediately available with the customer’s explicit consent, without the need to store this data at each dealership or at a car manufacturer.
A trusted and verifiable data-enabled mobility ecosystem helps companies offer new services, such as car-sharing or car-exchanging that can involve dealers, for example, as drop-off and pick-up locations. This includes making the process of verifying auto insurance and driver qualifications seamless.
If I’m on vacation and don’t need my car, I can share it, or if I drive a compact car and need an SUV for a few days, I can connect with the ecosystem and benefit from this shared economy. In addition, the revenue I collect from the shared vehicle could be applied to a down payment on a new car.
Dealers benefit too. They can offer inspecting and cleaning services for the shared cars, and they get potential new customers at their location. Car makers benefit because they can grow their brand’s value and get insights into car usage.
Controlling identity, unblocking consent
Empowering an individual or an asset to control one’s own identity is a precursor to companies’ reaping the benefits of pooled data. Through self-sovereign identity, an individual will be able to consent, authenticate or verify themselves without having to present their documents. Users can access third-party-owned products and services while keeping their anonymity.
Many organizations and consortiums are contributing towards the establishment of open source decentralized identity to achieve interoperability among all participants, set protocols, and develop technologies and code in areas including decentralized identifiers (DID) and verification, storage and compute, authentication, claims and verifiable credentials. The focus of these efforts has been to decouple the trust between the identity provider and the relying party to create a more flexible and dynamic trust model such that the ecosystem benefits from increased market competition and customer choice.
In 2020, we expect to witness deployment of self-sovereign identity to unblock consent, which will help organizations leverage inaccessible data sets without breaching privacy regulations. This will facilitate decentralized data marketplaces that provide a level playing field for all market players by enabling any of them to monetize data. It allows for improved and customized offerings, thus setting higher standards and increasing the overall value of the ecosystem.
Scrum — a management framework that focuses on cutting through complexity to better meet business needs — maps out the elements required to run a successful project. However, many projects need to go beyond the typical Daily, Planning, Review and Retro meeting sessions used in the Scrum process to be truly successful.
There are ways to enhance your Scrum framework, increase control and improve cooperation with key stakeholders. Below are suggestions for additional meetings, taken straight from Anteelo best practices, that can help keep your process on track.
Scrum Master/Product Ownermeeting (SM/PO)
Who Should Attend: Scrum Master and Product Owner
When Should They Meet: Recommended weekly, depending on the size of your backlog
As the name suggests, this meeting takes place between the SM and PO. Since neither is required at the Daily Scrum, they do not have a formal time to share any news, focus on issues or align the responsibilities. But for teams with differing agile experience, the responsibilities of one and another might seem fuzzy. This meeting is dedicated to clearing out that fuzziness.
In an ideal world, every scrum project would be 100% compliant with the Scrum Guide. However, these projects are very hard to come by. That’s why one of the main goals for SM is to create and implement the final vision of the scrum framework for the project, one that’s unique, tailored to your project and containing your own “flavor.” This requires cooperation and alignment between SM and PO.
A useful tool to manage your work is the SM/PO Backlog. This is a separate document with a list of issues or questions you should solve to keep your project running. Examples include trainings for the development team, documentation or stakeholder management.
Who Should Attend: SM, PO, Program Manager, Development Team, relevant stakeholders
When Should They Meet: Recommended weekly, although it could be less often if merged with another meeting
The primary goal of RIOM is avoiding foreseeable issues. This is seemingly handled during the Daily Standups, when the development team shares any potential threats to the Sprint Goal. On the other hand, fixating only on the short-term risks may result in losing the big picture.
To counter that, we recommend having a separate meeting with relevant stakeholders. Inviting the development team makes sense, as they have hands-on knowledge of risks, issues or opportunities.
Steering Board meeting
Who Should Attend: Steering board, SM, PO
When Should They Meet: Should take place at least once a sprint. A rule of thumb is bi-weekly.
Every project needs control. Scrum makes it easier thanks to transparency and cooperation with the client. Ideally your Product Owner is part of the client’s organization, having a clear communication channel with business stakeholders.
As a Scrum Master, you still want to be able to inform or influence your stakeholders. Experience shows that Review meeting is not enough to avoid hazardous communication gaps. The overall status of the project needs to be tracked and managed closely. The more information shared with stakeholders, the more support you can muster from management.
Transparency is encouraged in the agile approach, and meeting with your Steering Board is crucial to ensure communication gaps are bridged before they cause delays or harm your project. Steering Board meetings can be successfully combined with RIOM.
Roadmap update meeting
Who Should Attend: Scrum Team
When Should They Meet: Quarterly and/or after major business changes of the project
Product Backlog is one of the key tools for Product Owner. Backlog is supplemented beautifully with the Product Roadmap. Product Roadmap outlines high-level directions, functionalities or areas of product development over a 1-year period (could be longer). In other words, it helps express the product vision.
PO is responsible for keeping the roadmap up to date. This document gives the Scrum Team a better understanding of how the sprints align with the overall direction of the project. Although roadmap is created and maintained by PO (in conjunction with the business stakeholders), it’s vital that the Scrum Team stays informed.
This is only a handful of meetings to enhance your Scrum framework, providing guidelines about possible shortcomings. Ultimately, it’s up to the Scrum Master to tailor the framework to the needs of the project.
