What is a Chatbot?
“A Chatbot: A computer program designed to simulate a conversation with human users, especially over the Internet.”
With the increasing number of technologies available, the enormous amount of information available on the tips of our fingers, its really surprising to keep an eye on the extent to which we tend to accept media hypes and advertising publicity stunts from different companies without questioning their credibility or verifying their information.
And as I have been focusing during my work in the Conversational Artificial Intelligence field on introducing new concepts to customers and end users, explaining the difference in technologies, use cases, and applications, to help them with the selection of their services and technologies, I have been troubled by many companies, who introduce incorrect definitions or terms in their campaigns to attract customers, and fail to deliver the technology or the application they promise to, ending up negatively affecting all the providers who work in this space.
One of the spaces I’ve seen this happen a lot is the new “Conversational Agent” or the ” Chatbots” space, as some people like to mistakenly or on purpose call sometimes. This is where I would like to spend the next couple of minutes.
Conversational Agent
“A conversational agent is a software program which interprets and responds to statements made by users in ordinary natural language. It integrates computational linguistics techniques with communication over the internet.”
What is a conversation? Conversation is an interactive exchange of ideas, feelings, thoughts between two sides or more. I’ve touched on the characters of Conversations and Human-like Conversations in my article “I Want to talk to a Human!”
Conversational Agents are generally divided into two types:
Goal-oriented dialog Agents
A Computer program designed for a particular task, utilizing short conversations to get information from the user to help complete this task. These usually include digital assistants on smartphones and personal devices such as Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant etc …, along with other systems that companies deploy on their websites or social media sites to answer questions and help with issues.
Goal Oriented dialog agents usually follow a finite-state dialog flow, with preprogrammed structure of the conversation, and where the “System” controls the direction of the conversation, asking the users questions, and usually misinterpreting or ignoring any user’s input that is not a direct answer to the question, although some goal-oriented systems were able to implement mixed initiatives, where the control of the conversation toggles between the system and the user, they still don’t allow the user much flexibility.
Chatbots
According to Oxford Dictionaries, a chatbot is
“A computer program designed to simulate conversation with human users, especially over the Internet.”
Artificial Intelligence powered Chatbots are designed to handle full conversations, mimicking the unstructured flow of a human to human conversation. Unlike Goal oriented dialog agents, Chatbots utilize the power of AI to learn from human conversations in order to learn how to respond, in addition to understanding user’s intent and analyzing the context of the conversation in order to respond properly to the user.
“All Chatbots are Conversational Agents, but not all Conversational Agents are Chatbots !”
So what does that mean for you?
Knowledge and decision making! understanding the difference between a Conversational agent and an AI-powered Chatbot can help you decide which is the best use for your business. In addition, it helps you avoid being tricked into the faulty branding some companies in this sector are using to market their products as “Chatbots” without delivering the full “Chatbot” AI-powered conversational experience.
botique.ai is an enterprise platform that automates chat interactions using proprietary Conversational AI. We compose Chatbots using a wide selection of pre-built, pre-trained AI modules, which makes the integration process quick and easy.
