What began as a televised ad campaign eventually became a fully interactive chatbot developed for PG Tips’ parent company, Unilever (which also happens to own an alarming number of the most commonly known household brands) by London-based agency Ubisend, which specializes in developing bespoke chatbot applications for brands. The aim of the bot was to not only raise brand awareness for PG Tips tea, but also to raise funds for Red Nose Day through the 1 Million Laughs campaign.
Interestingly, the as-yet unnamed conversational agent is currently an open-source project, meaning that anyone can contribute to the development of the bot’s codebase. The project is still in its earlier stages, but has great potential to help scientists, researchers, and care teams better understand how Alzheimer’s disease affects the brain. A Russian version of the bot is already available, and an English version is expected at some point this year.
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.
MEOKAY is one of the top tools to create a conversational Messenger bot. It makes it easy for both skilled developers and non-developers to take part in creating a series of easy to follow steps. Within minutes, you can create conversational scenarios and build advanced dialogues for smooth conversations. Once you are done, link and launch your brand new chatbot.
According to Richard Wallace, chatbots development faced three phases over the past 60 years. In the beginning, chatbot only simulated human-human conversations, using canned responses based on keywords, and it had almost no intelligence. Second phase of development was strictly associated with the expansion of Internet, thanks to which a chatbot was widely accessed and chatted with thousands of users. Then, the first commercial chatbot developers appeared. The third wave of chatbots development is combined with advanced technologies such as natural language processing, speech synthesis and real-time rendering videos. It comprises of chatbot appearing within web pages, instant messaging, and virtual worlds.
But Zuckerberg is just getting started. And he is doubling down on his plan to monetize Facebook by delving into the foggy world of artificial intelligence (AI) in order to have computer software programs called bots, take over sales and customer service functions on Facebook's Messenger platform. This has profound consequences not only for Facebook’s bottom line, but for marketers as well.
The most widely used anti-bot technique is the use of CAPTCHA, which is a form of Turing test used to distinguish between a human user and a less-sophisticated AI-powered bot, by the use of graphically-encoded human-readable text. Examples of providers include Recaptcha, and commercial companies such as Minteye, Solve Media, and NuCaptcha. Captchas, however, are not foolproof in preventing bots as they can often be circumvented by computer character recognition, security holes, and even by outsourcing captcha solving to cheap laborers.
However, web based bots are not as easy to set up as a stand-alone chatbot application. Setting up a web-based chatbot requires at least minimal experience with HTML, JavaScript and Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML). Additionally, any sort of “fancy” features, such as Text To Speech, or an animated avatar, would have to be created and integrated into your chatbot’s page, and certain features, such as voice recognition, are either unavailable, or are severely limited.
Amplify your Facebook advertising, content reach and customer service by using this one of the best messenger marketing tools will surely do your business good. Formerly known as ChattyPeople, this bot tool can be easily integrated without any coding knowledge. MobileMonkey integrates with tools such as Shopify you can monetize your fan page in simpler ways than you thought.
Automated customer support with smart businesses chatbots. ActiveChat is an omnichannel chatbot platform for natural language customer support. Using this platform you can seamlessly integrate with CRM and CMS and make more sales with e-commerce integrations. “We provide you with everything you need to build great chatbots. Conversational design with Visual Bot Architect is easy as building with LEGO blocks”, claims ActiveChat.
The term Chatbot is closely related to chat bot and chatterbot. Chatterbot is more popular in relation to chatbot who talk a lot, and is not necessary very intelligent in processing the user answers. Chat bot is used by technical people who consider the word ‘bot’ as a normal term for ‘robotised actions’, and for them ‘chat bot’ is a special kind of bot. The term Chatbot is actually the most popular amongst these three terms and has the broadest meaning.
The chatbot uses keywords that users type in the chat line and guesses what they may be looking for. For example, if you own a restaurant that has vegan options on the menu, you might program the word “vegan” into the bot. Then when users type in that word, the return message will include vegan options from the menu or point out the menu section that features these dishes.
In 1950, Alan Turing's famous article "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" was published,[8] which proposed what is now called the Turing test as a criterion of intelligence. This criterion depends on the ability of a computer program to impersonate a human in a real-time written conversation with a human judge, sufficiently well that the judge is unable to distinguish reliably—on the basis of the conversational content alone—between the program and a real human. The notoriety of Turing's proposed test stimulated great interest in Joseph Weizenbaum's program ELIZA, published in 1966, which seemed to be able to fool users into believing that they were conversing with a real human. However Weizenbaum himself did not claim that ELIZA was genuinely intelligent, and the introduction to his paper presented it more as a debunking exercise:

There has been a great deal of controversy about the use of bots in an automated trading function. Auction website eBay has been to court in an attempt to suppress a third-party company from using bots to traverse their site looking for bargains; this approach backfired on eBay and attracted the attention of further bots. The United Kingdom-based bet exchange Betfair saw such a large amount of traffic coming from bots that it launched a WebService API aimed at bot programmers, through which it can actively manage bot interactions.

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.) 
Amplify your Facebook advertising, content reach and customer service by using this one of the best messenger marketing tools will surely do your business good. Formerly known as ChattyPeople, this bot tool can be easily integrated without any coding knowledge. MobileMonkey integrates with tools such as Shopify you can monetize your fan page in simpler ways than you thought.
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Several studies accomplished by analytics agencies such as Juniper or Gartner [36] report significant reduction of cost of customer services, leading to billions of dollars of economy in the next 10 years. Gartner predicts an integration by 2020 of chatbots in at least 85% of all client's applications to customer service. Juniper's study announces an impressive amount of $8 billion retained annually by 2022 due to the use of chatbots.
The “stand-alone” application, where the chatbot runs on a single computer, integrates mostly some sort of system interface, allowing your chatbot to control certain aspects and functions of your computer, such as playing media files, or retrieving documents. It usually also has a graphical component built in, as well, in the form of an avatar (often female) that enhances interaction, thus improving user’s experience.
Marketer’s Take: A great example of a chat bot that makes purchasing products and services easy. In its next generation, I expect 1-800-Flowers to ping me on special occasions, send Facebook messages to the recipient automatically, and notify me on Facebook that the flowers have been delivered. The combined digital and physical experience will up the game in the flower delivery business.
This is where most applications of NLP struggle, and not just chatbots. Any system or application that relies upon a machine’s ability to parse human speech is likely to struggle with the complexities inherent in elements of speech such as metaphors and similes. Despite these considerable limitations, chatbots are becoming increasingly sophisticated, responsive, and more “natural.”
Build a bot directly from one of the top messaging apps themselves. By building a bot in Telegram, you can easily run a bot in the application itself. The company recently open-sourced their chatbot code, making it easy for third-parties to integrate and create bots of their own. Their Telegram API, which they also built, can send customized notifications, news, reminders, or alerts. Integrate the API with other popular apps such as YouTube and Github for a unique customer experience.

There are several defined conversational branches that the bots can take depending on what the user enters, but the primary goal of the app is to sell comic books and movie tickets. As a result, the conversations users can have with Star-Lord might feel a little forced. One aspect of the experience the app gets right, however, is the fact that the conversations users can have with the bot are interspersed with gorgeous, full-color artwork from Marvel’s comics. 
A.L.I.C.E. was written within the frame of Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML), an open standard for creating any kind of chatbot, also developed by Wallace. Most AIML interpreters are offered under a free or open source license. Therefore, many “Alicebot clones” populate the internet, having been created based upon the original implementation of A.L.I.C.E. and its AIML knowledge base. This video shows a speech as given by dr. Wallace about A.L.I.C.E., AIML and the chatbot history in general.
Although Weizenbaum created his ELIZA thirty years before Internet became familiar to the general public, his creation is still alive and accessible to everyone. Watch the following video created by a youtube user IanProCastsCoUk, and see how the javascript version of Eliza emulates a Rogerian psychotherapist, responds on questions and leads simple conversations.

There is a lot of hype surrounding chatbots, and they are quickly becoming a standard part of any digital marketing strategy. Chatbots bots are very versatile services, and when setup correctly, can help customers answer questions and fulfill an array of tasks. Chatbots may sound like an intimidating obstacle, but with the right preparation and guidance, they can become tools that help you monetize your social media pages. I’ve put together a guide to help you understand the benefits of chatbots, how they work, and how to build your own chatbot online for your brand.
Bots for Messenger are for anyone who's trying to reach people on mobile - no matter how big or small your company or idea is, or what problem you're trying to solve. Whether you're building apps or experiences to share weather updates, confirm reservations at a hotel, or send receipts from a recent purchase, bots make it possible for you to be more personal, more proactive, and more streamlined in the way that you interact with people.
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