You’ve probably interacted with a 

chatbot whether you know it or not. For example, you’re at your

computer researching a product, and a window pops up on your screen asking if you need help. Or
perhaps you’re on your way to a concert and you use your smartphone to request a ride via chat. Or you
might have used voice commands to order a coffee from your neighborhood café and received a
response telling you when your order will be ready and what it will cost. These are all examples of
scenarios in which you could be encountering a chatbot.

What is a chatbot?

At the most basic level, a chatbot is a computer program that simulates and processes human
conversation (either written or spoken), allowing humans to interact with digital devices as if they were
communicating with a real person. Chatbots can be as simple as rudimentary programs that answer a
simple query with a single-line response, or as sophisticated as digital assistants that learn and evolve to
deliver increasing levels of personalization as they gather and process information.

A computer program anybody can talk to with normal language. No matter what type of chatbot it is,
they all have a similar purpose -- to take regular human language input, understand what is being said
and to provide a relevant, correct answer based on the knowledge it has.

Types of chatbot

A Chatbot may be as simple as basic pattern matching with a response, or it may be a sophisticated
weaving of artificial intelligence techniques with complex conversational state tracking and integration
into existing business services.

There are two kinds of chatbots in the market today: Scripted bots and Artificial Intelligence
(AI) bots. Scripted bot is like a rule-based guided conversation and performs like a decision
tree where each action by the user prompts the bot to take action or respond. For example,
Sephora (a popular makeup retailer in the U.S.) has a bot on Kik. The bot engages users with
questions about makeup preferences and serves up content and offers relevant to their
responses. While it may not sound like a sophisticated process – the more the consumer
engages with the bot over time, the smarter the bot (and the brand) becomes about consumer
preferences and is able to serve personalized content and offers. AI bots are built on Machine
Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities. They are based on the
human capability of learning and absorbing information owing to which they are more efficient
and can process much faster than humans and may come up with more subtle results.i
uman-like Advisor • General AI, also known as human-level AI or strong AI • The type of
Artificial Intelligence that can understand and reason its environ
Approaches used to design the chatbots

 In a Rule-based approach, a bot answers questions based on some

rules on which it is trained on. The rules defined can be very simple to
 very complex. The bots can handle simple queries but fail to manage
complex ones.
 Self-learning bots are the ones that use some Machine Learning-
based approaches and are definitely more efficient than rule-based
bots.

Chatbots help enterprises in various ways as mentioned below: 1. Chatbots have a number of potential
benefits over traditional GUIs. First, they can simplify applications for users. For example, rather than
navigating through an interface or website to find information, users can just say or type what they
want. Users can also compress multistep tasks into a single command, such as, “Get my list of open
opportunities this quarter, and send it to Janet.” Do Chatbots have inherent advantages over humans 2.
Second, the conversational UIs that chatbots offer may require little to no training, given that they
understand and can interpret natural language and translate it into actions. 3. Third, users can leverage
chatbots to operate several business applications at once. For example, users can invoke multiple
chatbot actions in conversation with team members at the same time.

How it works?

Under the categories of Conversational Chatbots and Button Bots, there are sub-variants of chatbot.
Although how they work might change radically (and affect their overall quality), all chatbots have two
basic high-level functions: "understanding" and "answering"

Pattern Matches: Bots utilize pattern matches to group the text and it produces an appropriate response
from the clients. “Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML), is a standard structured model of these
Patterns.
A simple example of Pattern matching is;

Then the machine gives the following output:

Human: Who invented the email?
Robot: According to Google, Ray Tomlinson invented email.
The Chatbot knows the appropriate answer because her or his name is in the related pattern. Similarly,
the chatbots react to anything relating it to the correlate patterns. But it can’t go past the related
pattern. To take it to a progressive stage, algorithms can help.
For every sort of question, a remarkable pattern must be accessible in the database to give a reasonable
response. With a number of pattern combinations, it makes a hierarchical structure. We utilize
algorithms to lessen the classifiers and produce the more reasonable structure.
2. Natural Language Understanding (NLU)

This NLU has 3 specific concepts as follows:

Entities: This essentially represents an idea to your chatbot. For example, it may be a payment system in
your E-commerce chatbot.
Context: When a natural language understanding algorithm examines a sentence, it doesn’t have the
historical backdrop of the user’s text conversation. This implies that, if it gets a response to a question it
has been recently asked, it won’t recall the inquiry. So, the phases during the conversation of chat are
separately stored. It can either be banners like “Ordering Pizza”. Or could include other parameters like
“Domino’s: Restaurant”. With context, you can easily relate expectations with the necessity of
comprehending the last question.
Expectations: This is what a chatbot must fulfill when the customer says sends an inquiry. Which can be
the same for different inquiries. For example, the goal triggered for, “I want to purchase a white pair of
shoes”, and “Do you have white shoes? I want to purchase them” or “show me a white pair of shoes”, is
the same: a list of shops selling white shoes. Hence, all user typing text show a single command which is
the identifying tag; white shoes.
3. Natural Language Processing (NLP)
(NLP) Natural Language Processing Chatbots finds a way to convert the user’s speech or text into
structured data. Which is then utilized to choose a relevant answer. Natural Language Processing
includes the following steps;

1. Tokenization: The NLP separates a series of words into tokens or pieces that are linguistically
representative, with a different value in the application.
2. Sentiment Analysis: It will study and learn the user’s experience, and transfer the inquiry to a
human when necessary
3. Normalization: This program model processes the text to find out the typographical errors and
common spelling mistakes that might alter the intended meaning of the user’s request.
4. Named Entity Recognition: The program model of chatbot looks for different categories of
words, similar to the name of the particular product, the user’s address or name, whichever
information is required.
5. Dependency Parsing: The Chatbot searches for the subjects, verbs, objects, common phrases
and nouns in the user’s text to discover related phrases that what users want to convey.

The Future of Chatbots

Where is the evolution of chatbots headed? Chatbots, like other AI tools, will be used to further enhance
human capabilities and free humans to be more creative and innovative, spending more of their time on
strategic rather than tactical activities.

In the near future, when AI is combined with the development of 5G technology, businesses, employees,
and consumers are likely to enjoy enhanced chatbot features such as faster recommendations and
predictions, and easy access to high-definition video conferencing from within a conversation. These and
other possibilities are in the investigative stages and will evolve quickly as internet connectivity, AI, NLP,
and ML advance. Eventually, every person can have a fully functional personal assistant right in their
pocket, making our world a more efficient and connected place to live and work.