Table of Contents
What is Chatbot ?
A chatbot is a computer program that communicates with its users via text to speech or direct text message exchange. A chatbot enacts in a human-like fashion and the user feels like he/ she is communicating with a live agent. In this article, we will discuss ai-chatbot in detail, from the inception to the most modern ai-chatbot, its evolution, and how ai-chatbot is changing the game for small, medium, and large enterprises and its impact in 2021.
Chatbots communicate with its Users/ Clients through a series of questions and answers. Users can wish to switch on / off the text-speech conversion.
Chatbots are mostly available in different websites where viewers / users of those websites can also communicate even if the live customer care representatives are not present. This helps to increase customer satisfaction and receive offline messages which they can process later when live customer agents are available at the workplace and they won’t lose their customers, especially if the employees are not working on weekends/ holidays.
What is AI-Chatbot ?
AI-chatbots are ai-powered chatbots that can make decisions and give solutions as well based on a certain level of intelligence. The efficiency is based on Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, neural network, deep learning, etc.
Ai-chatbots make decisions based on the previous experiences and even if the language of the user input varies, it applies its own intelligence to make the right decision based on the input data pattern.
What is the difference between Ai-chatbot and normal chatbot ?
A normal chatbot works within the boundary of a set of well defined rules. The possible scenarios are predefined and the bot works accordingly. It can’t answer beyond those boundaries. It can be very easy or complicated to create a normal chatbot based on the complexity of the algorithm. It doesn’t use any machine learning techniques to make decisions.
On the other hand, ai- chatbots use machine learning algorithms to make decisions. It has a trained dataset. When a user provides any input, the decisions are made and language is generated using NLP ( Natural Language processing technique). AI-chatbots are much more costly to design and develop in terms of time and investment. I have discussed in detail the architecture of ai-chatbot and how it works in the later section of this article so please be with me until the end to get a good knowledge of AI-Chatbots.
Evolution of the AI-Chatbot
The first ever conceptual representation of chatbot was the “Turing Test” by famous computer scientist Alan Turing in 1950. This test was executed to figure out the difference between humans and a machine based on the answers to a set of questions and to identify whether a machine can have its own intelligence.
- The first official Ai-Chatbot was developed in 1966. The creator of this chatbot is Joseph Weizenbaum, a german american computer scientist, professor of MIT ( died in 2008). He is considered to be one of the Father figures of Artificial Intelligence !! The name of that chatbot was ELIZA, named after a play character.This was the first chatbot which was able to pass the Turing test (Alan Turing).
- PARRY was created by an american psychiatrist in 1972. PARRY imitated the psychological behaviour of a schizophrenia patient.PARRY works via a complicated system of assumptions, attributions, and “emotional responses” triggered by changing weights assigned to verbal inputs. PARRY was also successful to pass the Turing test.
- JABBERWACKY was developed by a british programmer named Rollo Carpenter, who wanted to make his chatbot to simulate human chat in an interesting, entertaining and humorous manner. This chatbot was developed in the year 1981 and it passed the Turing Test successfully.The chatbot is considered to use an AI technique called “contextual pattern matching.”
- Dr.Sbaitso was developed by a company called creative labs and it can run on MS DOS operating system as well. It is one of the earliest efforts of incorporating A.I. into a chatbot and is recognized for its full voice operated chat program.
- ALICE((Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) was developed by american scientist Richard Wallace in 1995. ALICE is used to do language processing by the process of linguistic pattern matching. The name ALICE was given because this bot was run first on a computer named ALICE. It was also called alicebot. ALICE uses a special kind of markup language called AIML ( Artificial Intelligence Markup Language ). It is one of the strongest programs of its type and has won the Loebner Prize, awarded to accomplished humanoid, talking robots, three times (in 2000, 2001, and 2004). The program is unable to pass the Turing test, as even the casual user will often expose its mechanistic aspects in short conversations.
- SMARTER CHILD was developed by the company called Active Buddy Inc in 2001. The main key people associated with the invention were Robert Hoffer, Timothy Kay and Peter Levitan. This bot was being used by AOL Instant messenger and MSN messenger. This Bot is also considered as a precursor to APPLE SIRI.
- MITSUKU : This chatbot was developed in 2005, after the name of an eighteen year old english girl.The core technology behind this chatbot is AIML. The concept is considered to be taken from ALICE with some additional extensions ( e.g more improvements on conversation generation ). MITSUKU has the quality to answer based on reasoning e.g. if it is asked “ Can you eat a house ?”, it will search for what a house is made with. If it finds Brick, metal , wood it will say “no”.
- SIRI is a virtual assistant owned by APPLE inc and is being used in all other apple products ( e.g. MacBook, iPad, iWatch, etc embedded in their operating system). SIRI was developed in the year 2010 by the SRI International Artificial Intelligence Center. Its speech recognition engine was provided by Nuance Communications, and Siri uses advanced machine learning technologies to function. Initially, the voices were recorded by professional voice actors of different countries e.g. America, the UK, Australia, etc. SIRI uses voice queries, gesture-based control, focus-tracking, and a natural-language user interface to answer questions, make recommendations, and perform actions by delegating requests to a set of Internet services. The software adapts to users’ individual language usages, searches, and preferences, with continuing use. Returned results are individualized.
- GOOGLE NOW: GOOGLE NOW was a feature of google search of the Google app in the android platform. IT was officially released in 2012. Google Now proactively delivered information to users to predict information they may need in the form of informational cards.
Evolution of CHATBOT Pictorial Representation
- CORTANA : Cortana was developed by Microsoft and it is used to perform specific tasks e.g provide recommendations or answer / communicate with the user as an intelligent bot. Cortana performs its search using BING search engine. Cortata was first introduced to the world in a conference in Sanfrancisco, CA, USA.
- ALEXA: Alexa is an intelligent bot developed by Amazon in 2014. Alexa is available on several devices of amazon e.g. Amazon echo show, Amazon echo dot. Nowadays third-party devices are also installing Alexa bot. All you have to say is “ Hi Alexa, play some music” or “ Hi Alexa find a gas station near me” or even more complicated instructions e.g order a Nike shoe from Amazon, etc. The Bot will recognize your voice and perform tasks accordingly.
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There is an app also available for Alexa, which you can install in your smartphone and that app allows you to add extra features.
How Ai-chatbot works ( technical design etc. )
The heart of ai-chatbot application is none other than NLP or Natural language processing.
When a user gives any input to the Bot, it tries to interpret the meaning of that input using “Deep Learning” techniques.
At the same time it analyses the input through a set of phases, which we are going to discuss in detail below and generates response output.
As you can see in the architecture above, There are two main parts of NLP in case of ai-chatbot application.
- NLU : Natural Language Understanding
- NLG : Natural Language Generation
NLU is responsible to understand the input language which is mostly in an unstructured form and create meaningful information so that Bot can understand and process.
On the other hand NLG is responsible to generate the response based on the analysis done by NLU for the input text given by the user of that BOT.
NLU has five stages of analysis phase
Lexical analysis
In this phase NLU analyses the input text by structurally breaking it into phrases, words, chapters, sentences etc.
Syntactic analysis / parsing
This phase is responsible to analyse the syntax of the input text. So it parses the input checks and figures out if there are any grammatical errors or wrong arrangement in the input text.
Semantic analysis
It analyses the meaningfulness of the input-text, based on the semantic and syntactic analysis.
- Discourse integration & Pragmatic analysis
This phase is responsible for the final outcome of the text.
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AI-CHATBOT MARKET : The chatbot market size is expected to grow from USD 2.6 billion in 2019 to USD 9.4 billion by 2024, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 29.7% during the forecast period. Key growth factors for the market include advancement in technology coupled with rising customer demand for self-services and 24*7 customer assistance at lower operational costs.
MARKET LEADERS IN AI-CHATBOT
The major players in the ai-chatbot market are GOOGLE, AMAZON, MICROSOFT, IBM, and FACEBOOK. Each of them has made a significant contribution by investing in the research and development of their own ai-chatbot. Each of the ai-chatbot is changing the game in terms of scaling up the business in many man times. Communication for any business using ai-chatbot with its clients is near future.
Let’s discuss each of them in brief.
Google’s Dialogueflow ai-chatbot is changing the game as it’s a Natural Language Understanding( NLU) platform, which understands user input in the form of text / audio, analyses it and generates response in the form of text or synthetic speech.
Dialogueflow provides two different services.
- Dialogueflow CX : Provides an advanced agent type suitable for large or very complex agents.
- Dialogueflow ES : Provides the standard agent type suitable for small and simple agents.
Google also provides two other products in the area of ai & NLP which are also very popular and useful.
- Tensorflow
- Cloud AI
- Google now
Google’s Cloud Natural Language API is focused on NLP/NLU capabilities such as “intent-entity detection, sentiment analysis, content classification, and relationship graphs.”
AMAZON
Amazon Lex provides a conversational interface for voice and text. Lex is built on top of deep learning methodologies. It has ASR ( Automatic Speech Recognition) and NLU(Natural language understanding) inbuilt to process input text or voice. ASR, NLU along deep learning technologies amazon is kind of ruling the world of the AI-enabled chatbot market and one of the most popular applications is Alexa which engages users effectively.
IBM
Watson Live Assistant is developed by IBM. Watson is one of the most advanced Ai powered chatbot used in many websites as a messenger to guide the user, providing recommendations or answering questions. It has to be trained first based on the data belonging to the specific industry the company is working on. It was first designed and developed as a question answering machine.
From a developmental perspective, it comes with a dialogue editor so with a very basic skill set you can develop it as well.
Facebook is playing major roles to be in the top in the game along with GOOGLE, MICROSOFT, APPLE & AMAZON. Facebook’s messenger app along with its recent ownership of WhatsApp for almost 20B US dollars has given it tremendous power to control the market. Facebook has its own database for billions of people who use its messenger app.
Facebook is also making huge investments in the research and development of ai-chatbot applications. The first ai-chatbot by Facebook was released in 2016 and it enables multiple users to chat at the same time in a group. In near future, we can see to accomplish many works like booking an event, booking a UBER cab, Buying items from amazon, etc.
OTHER SMALL PLAYERS IN THE MARKET
Other than the tech giants, there are small and mid-level companies that are also doing pretty good in developing ai-chatbots. Here are some of them
- Many chat
- Nvidia
- chat fuel
- bipbop etc and any more
Real-time applications/benefits/use of Ai-chatbot and how is changing the game in 2021 and near future
AI-chatbots are surprisingly making a tremendous impact on the economy. AI-chatbot is changing the game for many small, medium, and big enterprises and we will see more advancements in 2021 and ahead. many companies are integrating with ai-chatbots into their online services, which are able to provide support when live agents are not available or at least engaging in the initial conversation with the prospective customers.
Support
The most common and popular application of chatbot is customer support. Many websites or online web applications use ai-chatbot to communicate with users. ai-powered chatbots are important to maintain communication with its users or clients when human customer care representatives are not available. This can reduce cost for the company.
Specialized Task
Bots can be used to perform specialized tasks e.g. booking a cab or uber, taking doctor’s appointments, ordering food online or placing an order on e-commerce platforms like amazon. Also some online businesses can maintain inventory and purchase orders using ai-chatbot.
Scale up Business
The most beneficial outcome from ai-chatbot is, how amazingly it can scale up any business by providing automated customer support without the presence of live agents. Human beings can work up to limited hours. But chatbots can work as long as we make them work (24/7). So if a human can handle a certain number of calls or messages in a day, for a chatbot there is no limit, thereby ai-chatbot is changing the game by scaling up the business by multiple times.
Better Utilization of Human Resource
If we can replace customer support using bots, we can utilize those human resources for more skilled work. This will always be better utilization of human resources and overall growth for the company.
AI-CHATBOT is faster
ai-Chatbot is changing the game by providing much faster response than compared to human customer care officials. Ai-chatbot uses the power of NLU and NLG ( part of NLP ) to communicate with its clients or users. So the understanding of the input queries by users and generating the response text is purely based on a machine learning approach ( a series of lexical analysis, syntactical analysis, semantic analysis, etc ) which relates to the trained dataset based on previous logs, user input for certain situations.
BETTER MARKETING
Ai-chatbot is changing the game in the case of marketing more precisely in the digital marketing space where it guarantees automation for marketing in a much better way than pre-existing tools and techniques. Smart ai-chatbots can follow up with the clients on a regular basis resulting in more conversion e.g. “manychat” is being used by many marketing professionals to automate messaging marketing and regular basis follow up with clients or prospective buyers. These chatbots can also follow up with meetings, provide reminders, and nurture leads.
By using email bots and chatbots in concert, you can automate marketing campaigns with scheduling to deliver the right messages to the right customers at the right stage of the buyer’s journey.
Analysis and reporting, including A/B testing tools for email and chat, can help you optimize your responses and campaigns. This allows your marketing teams to focus on their priorities.
As you use Artificially Intelligent bots equipped with Machine Learning, they will become smarter over time. With training, your AI becomes more efficient as it gathers and analyzes more data input.