The use of digital assistants is on the rise and more people are taking to chatbots as a first point-of-contact with businesses. While chatbots have traditionally supported customer service departments, more businesses are now using them to automate marketing and sales efforts. For a simple entry point into the chatbot world, look no further than Facebook Messenger.
With all of this taking place in the world of marketing, as we speak (err, read), there are sure to sprout Facebook Messenger Chatbot Tools claiming to make wonders happen. What is needed to be understood here that one can actually build a chatbot from within the platform and also find some plug-ins to embed? But it comes with its zillion complications. Talking about the sprouting tools, some of them are excellent pre-built tools that can actually make things happen for you. Let’s take a look at some of the best in the industry that comes with the perk of having to require no coding knowledge.
Fast food just got faster. With Burger King’s new bot, simply order and pick up on demand. Simply choose menu items and pick the closest restaurant to pick it up. The bot then provides an estimated time and price. The bot is not available yet, but you can see from the demo, how it will work. It probably won’t tell you the calorie counts per menu item, but you can bet this bot will be programmed to inflate food sales.
ALICE – which stands for Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity, an acronym that could have been lifted straight out of an episode of The X-Files – was developed and launched by creator Dr. Richard Wallace way back in the dark days of the early Internet in 1995. (As you can see in the image above, the website’s aesthetic remains virtually unchanged since that time, a powerful reminder of how far web design has come.)
Along with the continued development of our avatars, we are also investigating machine learning and deep learning techniques, and working on the creation of a short term memory for our bots. This will allow humans interacting with our AI to develop genuine human-like relationships with their bot; any personal information that is exchanged will be remembered by the bot and recalled in the correct context at the appropriate time. The bots will get to know their human companion, and utilise this knowledge to form warmer and more personal interactions.
Chatbots are used in a diverse fashion, across all verticals and on many different types of channel, e.g. websites, social messaging, etc. In business their application accelerated rapidly in 2019, leading Van Baker, research vice president at Gartner, to predict that: “By 2020, over 50% of medium to large enterprises will have deployed product chatbots."[17]
A chatbot is a computer program which conducts a conversation via auditory or textual methods.[1] Such programs are often designed to convincingly simulate how a human would behave as a conversational partner, although as of 2019, they are far short of being able to pass the Turing test.[2] Chatbots are typically used in dialog systems for various practical purposes including customer service or information acquisition. Some chatbots use sophisticated natural language processing systems, but many simpler ones scan for keywords within the input, then pull a reply with the most matching keywords, or the most similar wording pattern, from a database.
Love them or hate them, chatbots are here to stay. Chatbots have become extraordinarily popular in recent years largely due to dramatic advancements in machine learning and other underlying technologies such as natural language processing. Today’s chatbots are smarter, more responsive, and more useful – and we’re likely to see even more of them in the coming years.
Please check out our main directory with 1376 live chatbot examples (an overview as maintained by developers themselves), our vendor listing with 256 chatbot companies and chatbot news section with already more than 370 articles! Our research tab contains lots of papers on chatbots, 1,166 journals on chatbots and 390 books on chatbots. This research section also shows which universities are active in the chatbot field, indicates which publishers are publishing journals on humanlike conversational AI and informs about academic events on chatbots. Also, check out our dedicated tab for awards, contest and games related to the chatbot field, various forums like our AI forum by chatbot enthusiasts and add any chatbot as created by yourself and your colleagues to our chatbot directory. Please do not forget to register to join us in these exciting times.
Streamchat is one of the most basic chatbot tools out there. It’s meant to be used for simple automations and autoresponders, like out-of-office replies or “We’ll get back to you as soon as we can!” messages, rather than for managing a broader workflow. It’s quick to implement and easy to start with if you’re just dipping your toes into the chatbot waters.
