There is no denying the fact that chatbots are disrupting the marketplace as they offer much more than meets the eye currently. Backed by AI, chatbots today are being used for ordering food, finding information about your favorite author, checking the weather, or conducting bank transactions. There is, however, so much more that seems possible with them in the near future.

What is the idea behind chatbots?

Around the 1980s, in a bid to making technology user-friendly, companies like Apple, Microsoft, and many others presented the graphical user interface to computer users. And today, we can’t imagine a technological device devoid of a screen and a graphical presentation. But the unimaginable is now possible!

In early 2016, we witnessed the first wave of artificial intelligence technology – the chatbots. We also saw developers at social media platforms like Facebook creating chatbots for their brand, allowing their consumers to carry out their daily actions from within the messaging platform. Chatbots as an AI development have proven exciting for everyone and have expanded the possibilities of how we communicate with a brand.

What is a chatbot?

Chatbot, the short for chat robot, is a computer program that simulates human chat or conversation using AI. The task of replicating human interaction is much nuanced, possible only because of AI. Chatbots aren’t just supposed to perform; they need to be likable as well. After all, they converse with humans. Built on NLP and ML, chatbots are based on the human ability to learn and absorb information, but more efficient. Chatbots can process information 1000 times faster than humans and come up with more subtle results.

A set of commands and phrases, implemented in the chat program, are used for communication with a chatbot. These chatbots become smarter and more capable over time, as they learn from users. In fact, it is this self-improving quality of chatbots that make them different from public chats and other channels where the content is created and fed by people. Chatbots, on the other hand, improve as a result of years of work in the field of AI.

Why use chatbots?

Well, there are a quite a few reasons for developing or using a chatbot.

• With chatbots, there is no need for an interface.
• Unlike any other interface that simply presents the user with limited options to choose from, with a chatbot, you can type in your answer. Therefore, chatbots promise convenience and flexibility.
• As we get comfortable using them, chatbots keep getting better as they learn more about their users, over time.
• Chatbots use their own accumulated intelligence to decipher a query and come up with an answer.
• With AI in chatbots, the need for writing exact commands for communication loses meaning. It is more about training AI about what commands it should write. It, therefore, needs data scientists who can tweak mounds of data and get closer to the desired result.
• The ability of chatbots to be available 24×7 and to scale at peak times makes them a good fit for an enterprise environment.
• Chatbots, with further advancements in machine learning and analytics, will be able to fix a problem encountered by a business user, with minimum loss of productivity.

Most IT firms and companies are developing their own AI-powered chatbots. This list includes Microsoft’s BoT Framework for Skype, Telegram’s BoT platform 2.0, and Facebook’s BoTs for Messenger, all released within the past year itself. In fact, a lot of developers believe that chatbots may just replace native applications altogether. It is, therefore, time for catching up with this new wave of technology and achieving your business goals.