It’s been a long time coming, but recently, we have seen new tools in the form of, Chatbots and Virtual Assistants, that are now available, and are specifically designed to make the interactions between people and machines, simpler, more efficient and an all-round smoother experience. The latest tools are being used in several business sectors, and are already making a huge difference to customer relations.
A Chatbot in Short
Artificial intelligence has improved at an accelerated rate over the past decade. To make chatbot software successful it needs to contain a form of Conversational AI software that has the ability to stimulate detailed conversation with a human user by using native language over the telephone, mobile apps, messaging applications, and websites.
Chatbots are now considered as an important tool because it is an effortless way for machines to answer a question from a human. The potential for this technology could revolutionise customer services of the future. As it is only at an early stage, chatbots currently only possess the intelligence for Question Answering systems using NLP (Natural Language Process).
The Mechanics of a Chatbot
A chatbot is centred around doing two different duties:
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Analysing the Users Request
Firstly, the chatbot will analyse the request made by the user. The purpose of this task is to identify what the intentions are from the user and from there, attempt to extract the relevant entities. The reason for this is that if the chatbot is unable to analyse the request, then it will not be possible for it to provide sufficient answers.
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Returning a Response
From the moment that the intentions have been understood, the responsibility of the chatbot to provide a sufficient and appropriate response to the user. There are several possible answers:
- offer text from an intelligence source which offer different responses.
- using the context, give information based from the provided user data
- a standard and generic response
- enterprise system data
- chatbot actions after interacting with backend applications
- further questioning from the chatbot in order to filter potential misinterpreted conversation.
The Importance of Chatbots
Having a streamlined interaction between humans and services, offers a great improvement in customer experience. To add to it, the cost benefits to a company mean that they can focus finances on other areas of the business, providing an even better product or service.
To be considered a success, a chatbot should be effectively performing both tasks that are asked of it. Of course, a chatbot must also rely on the human that programmed it.
Choosing the Right Chatbot Application
This all depends on what knowledge you wish your chatbot to possess. As it stands, there are some chatbots that are more suitable than others, depending on the issues. To get the best results possible, a combination of Artificial Intelligence forms may be best, such as Natural Language Processing, semantic understanding and machine learning. Doing enough research to find out what would be the most ideal chatbot solution for you should be the first step.
