Updated: A Comparison Of Eight Chatbot Environments

I have built prototypes with most of the commercial cloud and opensource Conversational UI & AI platforms currently available. I have found that environments are generally very similar in their approach to tools available for crafting a conversational interface. Considering what's available, chatbot development environments can still be segmented into 4 distinct groups. The leading commercial cloud environments attract customers and users to them purely for their natural language processing prowess and presence. Among these I would count IBM Watson Assistant, Microsoft Bot Framework / Composer / LUIS / Virtual Agents, Google Dialog Flow etc. Established companies gravitate to these environments, at significant cost of course.