Chatbot is a computer program that communicates with a human either via audio or text. It is built with a specific purpose in mind and usually have a very narrower scope.
Is Chatbot same as Personal Assistant like Siri/Cortana?
Personal assistants like Siri or Cortana have a far wider scope. They can answer questions related to current weather conditions. Or they can tell you jokes or recommend currently running movie. Whereas chatbots have a very specific function such as selling a product or providing help related to a product. They can also guide you through FAQ. But they can’t do more than that.
Typically chatbot assumes lot of human traits. It can have a photo of its own or it can have a name of its own. A chatbot can be mentioned in a conversation or it could be called out using name. It could be added to a group conversation or one could have one-to-one chat with the chatbot.
Conversational Chatbot
This type of chatbot uses NLP (Natural Language Processing) to understand human questions and responses and responds in such a fashion that human can understand.
Rule Based Chatbot
This type of chatbot presents the information in a very structured manner and doesn’t really understand conversational language. e.g. Instead of asking “Would you like to have a pizza or pasta?”, it would prompt “Choose your option: 1. Pizza 2. Pasta” etc. NLP is missing in these types of chatbots.
Historically there have been several types of bots such as crawlers, scarpers etc. All these are automated programs and were meant to do specific tasks, but they didn’t communicate with humans directly. Chatbot is advanced version of bots where bots are communicating with Humans. Essentially they are helping humans answering their questions or even selling some products to humans.
Some chatbots can initiate conversation proactively (after first initiation by human) whereas others need humans to start the interaction everytime. Proactive feature could be used by news websites to push the top stories or breaking news to humans who had initiated chat at least once and had opted in to receive these kind of notifications.
Use cases:
- Selling a product
- Providing account balance to authenticated customers
- Handle call center kind of work
- Send top news items
- Send movie recommendation
Developers can choose from variety of platforms and software options to build and deploy chatbots quickly.
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