Chatbots: A Case for Businesse

We are...

... in early stage of the modern development and rise of Chatbots, also known as ‘chatterbots’ or ‘conversation agents’ in the rolling tide of technology and innovation. The biggest companies in technology are heralding the potential shift that will take place: installing Chatbots into the essential fabric and inner-workings of institutional, and commercial enterprises in the years to come.

Short snippet into history

The history of Chatbots is interlaced with the broad development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), in particular - through the field of natural language processing. Examples of early (1960s) Chatbots include ELIZA which was designed to process human respondent’s replies as scripts. Using pattern matching techniques, ELIZA would from a response based on the initial key words and phrases from a respondents original text based entry — the bot in return would then simply substitute key words related to the respondent’s question in to predefined phrases.

The most notable script ELIZA ran was known as the DOCTOR. This script sought to provide a parody of a circuitous psychotherapist, responding to users as if in the beginning stages of a psychiatric evaluation. The idea of choosing a psychotherapist theme was in an attempt for the Chatbots creator to circumvent the problem of the Chatbot needing to provide direct, coherent and completely contextually related answers — for which ELIZA was not able. Instead the use of a psychotherapeutic actor allowed for the leniency of ELIZA to respond to questions, with other questions, answers for which in other situations would seem incoherent. Today, the challenge is to create Chatbots that actively learn from communication, providing meaningful and on-topic responses to human queries.

Bots have certainly come some distance in the modern day — gone are the days in which developers need to purposely disguise their creations as detached therapists. Since ELIZA, AI and Chatbots have undergone continuous development — increasing in sophistication and complexity. Though several decades of development and advancement in the field of natural language processing have advanced things, Chatbots have traditionally been situated as Weak AI—scripted, with little ability to learn, and easy enough to distinguish from a human, non-sentient. Still today, many of these Chatbots fill an applied, narrow purpose—conversing along certain dimensions, providing scripted responses, and being unable to learn and reproduce new information.

Evolutions of the chatbost

The evolution of Weak or ‘dumb’ AI Chatbots is a fundamental component of the evolution of natural language processing — The Chatbots of the future will, according to some sources; undoubtedly be more than simple conversational agents as we know them, but Chatbots with the ability to learn and apply some form of reasoned judgment towards a request or given problem. The natural language processing knowledge and technology that has built them will continue to expand and develop into ‘Smart Bots’ or Artificial Virtual Assistant’ — with the ability to handle almost any request given to them. Facebooks in-development virtual-assistant ‘M’ demonstrates this idea, M is able to answer simple queries, make restaurant reservations, and make entertainment or book recommendations. However, ‘M’ is still operated under the guidance of humans at this point — not an autonomous artificial agent.

The importance and centrality of Chatbots to our personal lives, and the everyday functioning of business and enterprise is being hailed as the quintessential shift, the next step, of our current technology Meta. Everyone from Gartner, Google, and public tech figures, like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella are placing their chips behind the bot revolution.

“We think that you should just be able to message a business in the same way that you message a friend” – Mark Zuckerberg

The philosophy underlying the evolution of modern Chatbots to a decidedly central role in future technology. The Guiding idea of transforming the face of technology to represent an integrated system, changing how we interact with everything from our devices, to how businesses network with one another, and individuals with business. Things like Apps and Search Engines — abstract interfaces that require one queries necessary terms, numbers or other identifiers to retrieve information, will instead make way for interactions that work on a conversational level. The idea being, that our interactions with technology will take a form more naturally resembling how we would talk to other people, and the exchanging, requesting, and giving of ideas and information will work more seamlessly within our lives. The evolution towards a conversation-as-a-platform paradigm has the potential for tremendous impact across all spheres of enterprise and business, much of these trends revolve around the potential for large-scale time-saving for simple problems, delivering content, services and entertainment efficiently and effectively.

Retail

Chatbots already function in different capacities across the retail sector—with things like shopping bots, that work through messaging applications or browsers to automate tasks, attempting to streamline the processes of online shopping without the need for as much human intervention. The H&M shopping bot for example—available on the newly unveiled KIK.com Botshop—allows users to set parameters for different functions on the H&M retail website, the bot then automates the task of the check-out, buying, and adding to cart. For example, the fast-food franchise Taco-Bell is currently developing “Taco-Bot” an intelligent Chatbot that works on the project-management messaging platform, Slack. The idea will be that people that are using the app to share and work on projects will be able to message the TacoBot and order food, rather than having to find the contact details of a Taco-Bell store, and use a separate device to contact them.

Services

With the development in complexity of conversational agents—Chatbots will become an ever more increasing predominance in the delivery of services. Changes in the multitude of Chatbots in use within the services and customer services industry is perhaps the most predominant and visible inclination on the viability of Chatbots in modern industry— With predictions from Gartner detailing the future omnipresence of the robo-boss across many businesses by 2018, to news reports of the future ‘replacement’ of human customer service reps with bots Current examples include Facebook rolling out a service that allows developers to build Chatbots from within Facebooks messenger service—in order for businesses to develop the means to utilize bots for customer service queries in messengers apps; to Microsoft announcing their investment into the conversation-as-a-platform Bot orientated future. Gartner predicts that “By 2018, six billion connected things will be requesting support.” Requiring the creation of entirely new service industries—ones that will entail AI, and bots themselves as the things that require support.

Transportation

Like every industry, Chatbots can be integrated into transportation services in a variety of ways. Company Moovit have developed what they call the first public transport bot. Designed to work through Facebook messengers Chatbot service, the bot is designed to support trip planning requests, provide suggested routes and methods of travel. The future integration of Chatbots with the transport industry is still uncertain, given the relatively undeveloped space. However, likely the ability to plan and streamline travel—as demonstrated by the Moovit App—will be part of this future, other possibilities could include the fully bot-automated booking of seats on a train, bus, or flight.