HealthTap helps you get answers for your health queries from physicians around the world, for free. You can browse through and read answers for similar queries as yours. Over 100,000 physicians with different specialities regularly review and post answers to the questions asked on HealthTap. So, the next time you’re down with headache after texting the entire night on Messenger, you know who to ping next.
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.
Fify claims to be an intelligent fashion discovery and transaction bot. “Fify will have memory and personality to behave just as humans. She will behave differently with different people. She will remember one’s taste and preferences. She will be context aware of what is happening in your world. Fify will first talk only about Fynd Fashion and eventually do all sorts of thing related to fashion — discuss trends, alert you about new arrivals, and even gossip about the latest fad of a movie star,” their blog claims.
_{A rapidly growing, benign, form of internet bot is the chatbot. From 2016, when Facebook Messenger allowed developers to place chatbots on their platform, there has been an exponential growth of their use on that forum alone. 30,000 bots were created for Messenger in the first six months, rising to 100,000 by September 2017.[8] Avi Ben Ezra, CTO of SnatchBot, told Forbes that evidence from the use of their chatbot building platform pointed to a near future saving of millions of hours of human labour as 'live chat' on websites was replaced with bots.[9]}
^{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.}
By relentless understanding of marketer needs, Zuckerberg has managed to convince marketers to move gigantic budgets from traditional advertising to Facebook in just a few years. As proof, according to eMarketer, digital ad spending will surpass TV Ad spending by early next year. In just a few more years, marketing budgets will be predominantly digital, while traditional TV and Radio advertising will follow in the red ink drenched footsteps of newspaper ads.
“There is hope that consumers will be keen on experimenting with bots to make things happen for them. It used to be like that in the mobile app world 4+ years ago. When somebody told you back then… ‘I have built an app for X’… You most likely would give it a try. Now, nobody does this. It is probably too late to build an app company as an indie developer. But with bots… consumers’ attention spans are hopefully going to be wide open/receptive again!” — Niko Bonatsos, Managing Director at General Catalyst
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.

Marketer’s Take: While I didn’t like being directed to a website to finalize my purchase, I understand why Spring decided on this approach given how the Messenger platform was just released. Yet, this may be a sound strategy if you’re looking to augment upselling and cross-selling opportunities or looking for deeper analytics than what Facebook Messenger is providing.

Although NBC Politics Bot was a little rudimentary in terms of its interactions, this particular application of chatbot technology could well become a lot more popular in the coming years – particularly as audiences struggle to keep up with the enormous volume of news content being published every day. The bot also helped NBC determine what content most resonated with users, which the network will use to further tailor and refine its content to users in the future.
Last, but not least coming in with the bot platform for business is FlowXO, which creates bots for Messenger, Slack, SMS, Telegraph and the web. This platform allows for creating various flexibility in bots by giving you the option to create a fully automated bot, human, or a hybrid of both. ChatBot expert Murray Newlands commented that "Where 10 years ago every company needed a website and five  years ago every company needed an app, now every company needs to embrace messaging with AI and chatbots."

The bot (which also offers users the opportunity to chat with your friendly neighborhood Spiderman) isn’t a true conversational agent, in the sense that the bot’s responses are currently a little limited; this isn’t a truly “freestyle” chatbot. For example, in the conversation above, the bot didn’t recognize the reply as a valid response – kind of a bummer if you’re hoping for an immersive experience.

_{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.}
^ "From Russia With Love" (PDF). Retrieved 2007-12-09. Psychologist and Scientific American: Mind contributing editor Robert Epstein reports how he was initially fooled by a chatterbot posing as an attractive girl in a personal ad he answered on a dating website. In the ad, the girl portrayed herself as being in Southern California and then soon revealed, in poor English, that she was actually in Russia. He became suspicious after a couple of months of email exchanges, sent her an email test of gibberish, and she still replied in general terms. The dating website is not named. Scientific American: Mind, October–November 2007, page 16–17, "From Russia With Love: How I got fooled (and somewhat humiliated) by a computer". Also available online.
Conversable is the enterprise-class, SaaS platform that will build your bot with you. They work with a lot of Fortune 500 companies (they’re behind the Whole Foods, Pizza Hut, 7-11, and Dunkin Donuts bots, among others). They go beyond Facebook Messenger, and will make sure your conversations are happening across all channels, including voice-based ones (like, for instance, OnStar).