Chatbots have been around for a few decades, originally as a way to bridge the gap between people and machines. These days, chatbots are everywhere, from Facebook Messenger to Slack. The bot ecosystem has exploded in recent years because they're relatively cheap and easy to create.
If you're a digital marketer or a business owner, you can use chatbots to reduce costs, grow organic traffic and generate leads. In this article, I am going to answer the question: how do chatbots work?
Types of Chatbots
There are two types of chatbots: chatbot platforms and conversational bots. Chatbot platforms are tools that allow you to build a bot without any technical knowledge. They are designed to be easy to use by developers who are not technical. Conversational bots are bots with which you can converse in real time. You can program these bots following industry standards to make them more intelligent.
How do Chatbots Work?
To understand how chatbots work, let's say that I want to interact with a chatbot named Sarah on Facebook Messenger. I click on the "Send Message" button and write, "Hi Sarah."
Step 1: First, the bot gets my message.
Step 2: Then it sends me a welcome message.
Step 3: I can now chat with Sarah. She will understand what I'm asking by analyzing my messages and replies with intelligent responses. All she needs to know is how to parse language like an expert human would (AI).
Chatbots understand human language with machine learning and natural language processing algorithms. To train a chatbot, you give it examples of various conversations it might have. The more conversations she has, the wiser she'll become.
To make Sarah more intelligent, I could also teach her to respond to commands regarding a restaurant reservation, a purchase on my wishlist or my delivery orders. She would do all of this through a series of example conversations provided by me.
How do Chatbots Work with Artificial Intelligence Tools?
Chatbots are designed to mimic human behavior to give customers a real-life experience. They are also trained to understand human language, emotions and reactions. For instance, they can tell if you're angry or amused by your attitude.
Here are some tools that are used to build the chatbot.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms translate human language into digital text and then into actionable tasks for the chatbot. Machine learning helps the bot to learn from each interaction with a human and improve its performance each time.
How to Create a Chatbot: Tools and Platforms
Chatbots use artificial intelligence frameworks like Facebook's Wit.ai, Microsoft Bot Framework and IBM Watson to understand human emotions and responses based on keywords, phrases or voice commands.
To create a chatbot, you first need a developer tool to create a bot on the platform of your choice. You can use Facebook Messenger, Slack or similar services. You then need to create the conversation flow with the chatbot, which includes conversations with humans and bots as well as smart replies from machine learning algorithms.
How do Chatbots Work in Real Life?
Chatbots that are built on platforms with artificial intelligence can converse with humans in natural language. These bots are able to understand the context of the conversation and respond accordingly. Most transactions can be handled with chatbots by using keywords, phrases or voice commands.
You will find chatbots everywhere: from customer service and support to personalized shopping experiences and virtual assistants like Siri or Cortana.
Chatbot Platforms
There are many existing chatbot platforms that can help you build a bot in just a few clicks. All you need to do is to download the platform and connect it to your application, website or social media account.
How do Chatbots Work in the Future?
Facebook recently made chatbots more "intelligent" by allowing them to communicate with users on Messenger without any human interaction. This means that brands can be used for advertising on Facebook Messenger without having to worry about the company maintaining an active account.
Chatbots are still in their infancy, so there is a lot of room for improvement. Soon, we will reach the point where chatbots can understand human language, personality and emotions better than humans themselves.