All You Need To Know About Chatbot!

CHATBOT

In this tutorial, you'll learn the importance and impact of chatbot in the Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI domain). You'll also look at the history of chatbots through the 1960s up to now. You then looked at various open platforms (Facebook Messenger, Skype, Slack, Kik, etc.) where chatbots can be deployed and how the basic user interface components look. So, let me quickly run you through with today's agenda. 

Agenda. 

• What is Chatbot?
• Types of Chatbot.
• History of Chatbot
• Chatbot Architecture.
• Various Chatbot Platform.
• Chatbot Applications.
• 2019 Chatbot statistics.

What is Chatbot?

A CHATBOT is the short-form of CHAT-ROBOT. In laymen term, a chatbot is a software application that enabled machine/computer to mimic a "natural human conversation".  Fundamentally, a chatbot allows a form of interaction between a human and a machine. The interaction can happen either via voice or text.

The chatbot program design to work on its own without any human interference. It can answer a question like a human operator. In case chatbot is not able to answer then it simple connect the customer to the live agent/operator for further assistance.   

You might be using chatbots in your daily life. If you have asked Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana or Google Duo about something for example What is the temperature outside? then you are interacting with a chatbot.

Examples of chatbots include Facebook Messenger, Siri, WeChat, Telegram, SMS, Slack, Skype, and many others. Popular chatbots such as Alexa, which function using voice communication, are currently quite popular.

Type of Chatbots.

A user can interact with a chatbot in two ways i.e. either by text or by voice. But chatbots are classified based on the level of complexity and features. So, a chatbot is divided into three below listed categories:

1. Basic Chatbot: The interface is typically quite basic and supports very basic commands. Typically, these bots sometimes called Scripted bots, will have multiple questions scripted, but again with limited basic inputs and capabilities. 
2. Text-based Agents: These type of bots are very common and supports more sophisticated inputs than basic chatbots. This type of bot may be scripted or may incorporate some elements of artificial intelligence.
3. Voice-based Agents: The most sophisticated types of agents are Voice-Based agents. They and makes use of natural language processing and text to speech in an interaction between a human and chatbot. For example Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple Siri.

History of the Chatbot.

Well, most of you might be thinking that chatbot is a new concept. But you'll be surprised to know that the concept of the chatbot is as old as COBOL language. The journey of chatbot begins in 1950 but it has gained a lot of importance recently and it is predicted that the chatbot industry is expected to grow exponentially for the next decade.

• Turing This program was used to proposing the Turing Test to determine the intelligence of computer programs.

• 1972 - PARRY Dr.Joseph Weizenbaum launched the first chatbot, ELIZA, in 1966. Using a combination of pattern matching and substitution methodology, Weizenbaum set out to prove the superficiality of human and computer communication while also passing the Turing Test. To Weizenbaum’s surprise, a number of people felt ELIZA exhibited a certain humanness.
  From there we’ve had an evolution of chatbots over the years, including:

• 1950 - Alan Kenneth Colby wrote the next rendition of ELIZA, this time modeling the behavior of a person with paranoid schizophrenia. 

• 1988 - Jabberwacky Rollo Carpenter, a British programmer, created Jabberwacky in order to prove that AI is capable of passing the Turing test. 

• 1989 - IRC Bots Early Internet Relay Chat (IRC) bots like Bill Wisner’s Bartender and Greg Lindahl’s GM were developed to facilitate games over IRC. They are a set of scripts or an independent program that connects to IRC as a client. 

• 1990 - The Leobner Prize It’s an annual competition that judges chatbots based on their human likeness. The format of the competition is based on a standard Turing test. In each round, a human judge simultaneously holds textual conversations with a chatbot and a human being via a computer. Based on the responses, the judge must decide which is which.

• 1992 - Dr. Sbaitso Creative Labs distributed Dr. Sbaitso, an AI speech synthesis program, with some of its sound cards. Dr. Sbaitso would act as the user’s counselor, audibly asking the user to tell the doctor about the user’s problems. The program’s AI was considered rudimentary, with its real goal being to showcase digitized voices. Some users had fun with Dr. Sbaitso by overloading him with all sorts of input, causing the program to crash with a parity error before resetting itself.

• 1995 - A.L.I.C.E. The natural language processing chatbot known as Alice was created by Richard Wallace. While it has won awards for its abilities, Alice has not been able to pass the Turing test. A fun fact for movie buffs: Alice was the inspiration for Spike Jonze’s 2013 movie Her, which featured the love story between an intelligent operating system and one of its users.

• 2010 - Siri Starting its life as an iOS app, Siri was built by Siri, Inc. and purchased by Apple and integrated into all of Apple’s major operating systems shortly after. Siri uses a natural language (NL) voice user interface to interact with users looking for information that Siri provides based on querying various web services and using machine learning.

• 2014 - Alexa Amazon created Alexa as the software powering its Echo device. Like Siri, Alexa uses a voice user interface to interact with users. Users use Alexa to control Echo devices to play music, get weather updates, shop for items, etc.

• 2016 - Facebook Messenger and Skype APIs Facebook and Microsoft both opened up their main messaging apps, Facebook Messenger and Skype, to third-party developers with APIs that allow chatbots to be more easily built and discovered in the apps themselves. Between the two messaging apps, there are well over a billion active users.

Chatbot Architecture.

It has a User and three sections. The first section is labelled Messaging platform. It has a mobile and a message icon. In the second section, Natural language processing, Bot logic, Actions and Machine learning are present. In the third section, Data repository, API, Human operator, and Information sources are present. The User is connected to mobile, which is further connected to message. The message is connected to Natural language processing, which is further connected to Bot logic. Bot logic is connected to Actions and Machine learning. Actions is connected to Information sources. All the above connections are made via double-sided arrows. The Information sources is further connected to Data repository, API, and Human operator via forward arrows.