ItsAlive provides a platform to easily build chatbots and services for brands by facilitating with your customer care, broadcasting, acquisition and brand awareness. Choose across platforms and services you think the best suit your brand image. “A Chatbot that can’t evolve with your needs doesn’t make sense. We have solutions to communicate challenges, and you choose the options”. ItsAlive is out with a 2.0 version that you can give a shot.

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.
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.
_{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.”}
Chatbots – also known as “conversational agents” – are software applications that mimic written or spoken human speech for the purposes of simulating a conversation or interaction with a real person. There are two primary ways chatbots are offered to visitors: via web-based applications or standalone apps. Today, chatbots are used most commonly in the customer service space, assuming roles traditionally performed by living, breathing human beings such as Tier-1 support operatives and customer satisfaction reps.

Since 2016 when Facebook allows businesses to deliver automated customer support, e-commerce guidance, content and interactive experiences through chatbots, a large variety of chatbots for Facebook Messenger platform were developed.[37] In 2016, Russia-based Tochka Bank launched the world's first Facebook bot for a range of financial services, in particularly including a possibility of making payments. [38] In July 2016, Barclays Africa also launched a Facebook chatbot, making it the first bank to do so in Africa. [39]

Reports of political interferences in recent elections, including the 2016 US and 2017 UK general elections,[3] have set the notion of botting being more prevalent because of the ethics that is challenged between the bot’s design and the bot’s designer. According to Emilio Ferrara, a computer scientist from the University of Southern California reporting on Communications of the ACM,[4] the lack of resources available to implement fact-checking and information verification results in the large volumes of false reports and claims made on these bots in social media platforms. In the case of Twitter, most of these bots are programmed with searching filter capabilities that target key words and phrases that reflect in favor and against political agendas and retweet them. While the attention of bots is programmed to spread unverified information throughout the social media platform,[5] it is a challenge that programmers face in the wake of a hostile political climate. Binary functions are designated to the programs and using an Application Program interface embedded in the social media website executes the functions tasked. The Bot Effect is what Ferrera reports as when the socialization of bots and human users creates a vulnerability to the leaking of personal information and polarizing influences outside the ethics of the bot’s code. According to Guillory Kramer in his study, he observes the behavior of emotionally volatile users and the impact the bots have on the users, altering the perception of reality.
Smart chatbots rely on artificial intelligence when they communicate with users. Instead of pre-prepared answers, the robot responds with adequate suggestions on the topic. In addition, all the words said by the customers are recorded for later processing. However, the Forrester report “The State of Chatbots” points out that artificial intelligence is not a magic and is not yet ready to produce marvelous experiences for users on its own. On the contrary, it requires a huge work:
Sometimes it is hard to discover if a conversational partner on the other end is a real person or a chatbot. In fact, it is getting harder as technology progresses. A well-known way to measure the chatbot intelligence in a more or less objective manner is the so-called Turing Test. This test determines how well a chatbot is capable of appearing like a real person by giving responses indistinguishable from a human’s response.
_{These days, checking the headlines over morning coffee is as much about figuring out if we should be hunkering down in the basement preparing for imminent nuclear annihilation as it is about keeping up with the day’s headlines. Unfortunately, even the most diligent newshounds may find it difficult to distinguish the signal from the noise, which is why NBC launched its NBC Politics Bot on Facebook Messenger shortly before the U.S. presidential election in 2016.}
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.
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.
You can ask Besure to find you any type of restaurant imaginable and it will find it for you based on your location. But the only locations it serves, are Copenhagen and San Francisco and nothing in-between (so far). Two great cities for cuisine, but the populations are small and so the coverage is light. You can be sure they expand in the near future.
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^{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.}
This simple act of marketing your brand on a messaging application can account for increased company exposure. Similar to email marketing, you can access a list of contacts to build upon. Messenger marketing allows you to directly send personalized data and content to your target audience while maintaining the goal of turning them into paying customers.
Previous generations of chatbots were present on company websites, e.g. Ask Jenn from Alaska Airlines which debuted in 2008[29] or Expedia's virtual customer service agent which launched in 2011.[29][30] The newer generation of chatbots includes IBM Watson-powered "Rocky", introduced in February 2017 by the New York City-based e-commerce company Rare Carat to provide information to prospective diamond buyers.[31][32]

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.

Facebook Messenger claims to have recently hit the much coveted ‘billion’ with 1.2 billion users on the platform. Last year, at Facebook’s Developer Conference, F8, the support for bots on Messenger platform was unveiled. And since then, developers from around the world have been working to leverage the next-gen technology. There are more than 100,000 bots available on Messenger today. David Marcus, Messenger’s CEO, states that the number of messages sent between businesses and customers has reached to 2 billion a month.