Are you exited or willing to get started with building AI chatbots? Whether your experienced or just a beginner(your starting your tech journey), sarufi.io is here to make it easy for you to create useful, powerful, and fun chatbots.

In this first guide if the series, we’ll cover:

• What is Sarufi, and why it’s a game-changer?

• How to set up your account for sarufi.io so you’re ready to go.

• Create your first chatbot in a minute — yes, it’s that simple!

Join us as we unlock Sarufi’s potential to solve different real world problems and bring and bring your chatbot ideas to life. Are we too late? Let’s build together, stay focused until the end of this series

What is Sarufi, and why it’s a game-changer?

What is Sarufi?

Sarufi is a conversational AI platform that enables African developers to build chatbots and conversational experiences in African languages. The platform handles the complexities of natural language processing, including intent detection, entity recognition, natural language understanding, and intent fulfilment.

Sarufi is a Swahili word that means "grammar."

Why Sarufi is a Game Changer in Conversational AI?

In todays world, chatbots are transforming the way business and service providers interact with their audience/customers. Yet for a business to build and deploy chatbots often feels like a daunting task, more complex, time consuming and last but not least requires special skills, they say/think.

Enters Sarufi.io, a revolutionary platform designed to simplify chatbot creation while unleashing its full potential. With its user friendly interface, integration capabilities, and its focus on real world applications, I can say that sarufi is redefining how developers and businesses approach conversational AI.

Let’s see, Sarufi empowers you to build intelligent chatbots that solves practical problems, engage users, and seamlessly integrate into everyday workflows. It’s more than just a tool, it’s your partner in building the future of communication.

Too much of explanations, here are the reasons why sarufi as a game changer:

1. Ease of Use

Sarufi simplifies the whole process of chatbot development, allowing developers to create intelligent conversational chatbots without a needing of extensive AI expertism. This reduces the learning curve, making it accessible to all skill levels.

2. Speed of development

With Sarufi you can build functional chatbots in minute. it a has simple to use UI design that gives you ability to make and re-use chat flows and define how users can interact with your service easily direct from sarufi dashboard as compared to traditional chatbot development methods, where it requires you to have special coding/programming skills.

3. Flexibility and scalability

The platform supports wide range of use case, from customer support to community management, making it suitable for both small projects and large-scale implementations

4. Focus on real-world problems

Sarufi is designed to help you to solve practical challenges, empowering developers and business to create chatbots focusing on their specific needs, whether for education, healthcare, fintech, or any industry (any of your idea).

5. Integration capabilities

With support of APIs and messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, SMS providers and many more, Sarufi allows seamless integration to these platforms allowing your services to be grow through medias where 1Billion plus people spend their days in, this is more than important to any business out there willing to thrive and grow.

6. Payment integrations

I have decided to separate this from “Integration capabilities“, though it lies in between but much more independent. Sarufi gives you ability to integrate different payment providers direct to your chatbots allowing customers to perform transaction in case needed, very important for commerce chatbots.

7. Sarufi's rich media support in chatbots?

Sarufi's rich media support allows chatbot developers to enhance the user experience by incorporating various types of media such as images, videos, documents, buttons, and menus. This means that users can receive more visually appealing and interactive responses, making the conversation with the chatbot more engaging and memorable. Additionally, validators can be used to ensure that users are inputting valid information, providing a more seamless and error-free experience. With Sarufi's rich media support, developers can create chatbots that are not only functional but also visually appealing and user-friendly.

Generally, Sarufi combines simplicity, speed, and power, making it a must-have tool for anyone looking forward to harness the potential of conversation AI.

Build Your First Chatbot in Minutes: A Step-by-Step Guide.

Creating your first chatbot with Sarufi is an exciting and surprising quick process! no steep learning curve, no complex coding, just intuitive and straight forward steps. with sarufi this is not just a dream its reality.

In this section, we’ll walk through the process of building your first chatbot. whether you want to create a simple chatbot that greets users or one that handles frequently asked questions from users, Sarufi makes it effortless. By the end of this guide, you’ll have a working chatbot that’s ready to engage your audience.

So, let’s get started and turn your chatbot ideas into reality!

Start using Sarufi:

Sarufi is open for free to all developers to start building your conversational artificial intelligence solutions using both Sarufi Dashboard and Sarufi APIs

Sign up for Sarufi.io

To use Sarufi you need to create an account on the sarufi.io

1. Go to sarufi.io website using any browser of your favourite, on the top navigation bar click “Get Started“ button on the right of side of the screen.

2. Click on register, then choose your preferred registration method (email and password, GitHub, or Google).

3. Verify your email address, using the email that you selected during registration, the go back login with your credentials or use (Google, or GitHub).

4. You’ll be redirected to create your business workspace, now fill the form (Add image, name, and description) for your workspace then click ““continue“.

5. In case you have a team Sarufi allows you to add collaborators in your workspace using their emails (optional).

6. Done, you created your Sarufi account and configured your business workspace.

Great work, lets go on developer.

Creating Your First Intent-Based Chatbot

Intent based chatbots are the foundation of conversation AI. these chatbots work by identifying the user’s intents (What they want or need) and providing an appropriate response. Let’s begin by building your first intent-based chatbot with Sarufi.

Intents are the goals or purposes behind a user’s input. For example:

• When a user says, "Hi," their intent might be to greet the chatbot.

• If they ask, "What are your business hours?" their intent is to get information.

By defining intents and associating them with specific responses, we create a chatbot capable of understanding and interacting meaningfully with users.

Quick Step-by-Step Guide to Building an Intent-Based Chatbot

Step 1: Create a New Chatbot

1. Login to your account then navigate to chatbots using the navigation menus.

2. Click on the “Create“ button.

3. On the menu, select intent based option, then give your chatbot a name (e.g., “GreenBot“) and description.

4. Choose industry which your chatbot belongs (e.g., “General“).

5. Then finally select the language for your chatbot (e.g., “English“) or Swahili currently they are supporting those two.

6. Click on the “Create“ button to create your chatbot. (You will be redirected to your chatbot builder dashboard). Nice work!

Step 2: Defining Intents and State Flow

When you successful create your first chatbot, four state flows and intents are automatically created for you, (greetings, thanks, bye, and cancel) they are important to know about them, their use case and importance of having them on our chatbot, but we shall explore them more as we continue to dig deep into Sarufi’s potentiality.

1. Add a Greeting Intent:

If you have already noticed that the greeting intent is already made for us you can customize it, under State flow, click on the greetings flow, then there you can customize Chatbot response when the chatbot detects that user is trying to greet or is initiating a new conversation, you can add response validations, connection to the next state flow immediately after greetings flow is done. On top there is an option written “intent“ you can click on it and add as many words as you can that you think falls in that state flow, this will increase ability for your chat bot to have a wide area of response.

2. Add a Help Intent:

After understanding how that works, now lets add a new state flow and its associated intents.

• State Name: Help

• User Inputs Examples:

  • "Can you assist me?"

  • "I need help."

  • "What can you do?"

• Chatbot Response:

  • "I’m here to assist you with your queries. Please let me know what you need."

Knowing our goal, then lets dive in:

• On the intents tab (where all states are listed), click on the plus button located top-right side of the table, this will open new state flow (empty) where we are required to fill information about our help flow.

• Now add the state name as “help“ (lowercase)

• Let it be a text component do not change that, we will explore more components later.

• Let the message variation switch off, we will explore these features later.

• Now on the message field add this "I’m here to assist you with your queries. Please let me know what you need."

• Then click “Save“

• Navigate to the “Intents“ tab, then click create

• Add the following one by one [ Can you assist me?, I need help, What can you do?]

• Then click “Save“

There we go, we have accomplished our goal, we have created a state flow which is called help, we have added some intents [ Can you assist me?, I need help, What can you do?], so when user tries to enter one of the intents the chatbot will directly respond using the response message we have set "I’m here to assist you with your queries. Please let me know what you need."

3. Test Your Chatbot:

To test our chatbot, click on the chatbot preview bubble on the bottom-right of your computer screen. the chatbot we are making will show up. you will see this message “Send a message to initiate conversation i.e. "Hello"“, so try sending hello, we get a multimedia response with a text response under it saying “Hello there. How can I assist you today?“ (This is the greeting response from the chatbot). Now lets test the help state flow, go on send one of these [ Can you assist me?, I need help, What can you do?], we will get our response as “I’m here to assist you with your queries. Please let me know what you need.“ which is the response that we have set previous.

Congratulations!

You’ve built your first intent-based AI conversational chatbot! With just a few steps, your bot can now recognize user intents and provide relevant responses.

Next Steps: Unlocking the Power of Knowledge-Based Chatbots

Congratulations! You’ve successfully built your first intent-based AI conversational chatbot, giving you a solid foundation in conversational AI. But there’s more to explore!

In our next post, we’ll guide you through creating knowledge-based chatbot, AI conversational chatbots that don’t just respond to predefined intents but leverage a rich database of information to answer complex queries. Whether it’s FAQs, detailed product information, or a custom dataset, knowledge-based chatbots can handle it all.

What’s Coming Next?

• Understanding knowledge-based chatbots.

• Connecting your bot to a knowledge base.

• Making your chatbot smarter and more dynamic.

Stay tuned as we explore more into Sarufi’s capabilities and upskill your Chatbot building abilities to pro level, it is just the beginning, subscribe, and share to other developers how sarufi can revolutionize business industry through conversations.

Continue Learning

• Visit the Sarufi Documentation to explore more features.

• Join our community on GitHub.

• Follow us on x.com for updates and tips.

Let’s keep building the future of conversations together!