In the early 90’s, the Turing test, which allows determining the possibility of thinking by computers, was developed. It consists in the following. A person talks to both the person and the computer. The goal is to find out who his interlocutor is — a person or a machine. This test is carried out in our days and many conversational programs have coped with it successfully.
The first formal instantiation of a Turing Test for machine intelligence is a Loebner Prize and has been organized since 1991. In a typical setup, there are three areas: the computer area with typically 3-5 computers, each running a stand-alone version (i.e. not connected with the internet) of the participating chatbot, an area for the human judges, typically four persons, and another area for the ‘confederates’, typically 3-5 voluntary humans, dependent on the number of chatbot participants. The human judges, working on their own terminal separated from one another, engage in a conversation with a human or a computer through the terminal, not knowing whether they are connected to a computer or a human. Then, they simply start to interact. The organizing committee requires that conversations are restricted to a single topic. The task for the human judges is to recognize chatbot responses and distinguish them from conversations with humans. If the judges cannot reliably distinguish the chatbot from the human, the chatbot is said to have passed the test.
“Major shifts on large platforms should be seen as an opportunities for distribution. That said, we need to be careful not to judge the very early prototypes too harshly as the platforms are far from complete. I believe Facebook’s recent launch is the beginning of a new application platform for micro application experiences. The fundamental idea is that customers will interact with just enough UI, whether conversational and/or widgets, to be delighted by a service/brand with immediate access to a rich profile and without the complexities of installing a native app, all fueled by mature advertising products. It’s potentially a massive opportunity.” — Aaron Batalion, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners
This is an enterprise-level, fully-managed bot provider, meaning you tell them what you want and they’ll build it for you. Their clients include top brands in range of industries, but especially in retail and CPG (consumer packaged goods) companies. This is probably because their chatbots can catalog and host a view of products within the chat itself, making it a favorite of beauty companies like Vichy, Covergirl and L’Oreal. Automat also integrates with Hootsuite Inbox using the Facebook Messenger handover protocol.
Insidiously and persistently, Facebook is chipping away at other messaging platforms and moving their users to Facebook Messenger. If they keep it up, by the end of 2017 there will be as many people on Messenger (currently 900 million) as Facebook (1.674 billion). But, counterintuitive as that strategy seems (why bifurcate resources on two fronts) that is all part of Mark Zuckerberg’s avec nous le deluge.
Increases sales, reduce costs and automates support—that what ChatFuel claims to come with. Qualify your leads and engage with prospects on a 24X7 basis. Automate sales or connect warm leads to a sales representative in a live chat. With ChatFuel, you can share content with the followers and subscribers while they interact with your brand over Facebook Messenger. This tool takes about 7 minutes to come up with a fully functional bot.
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.
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.
Using chatbot builder platforms. You can create a chatbot with the help of services providing all the necessary features and integrations. It can be a good choice for an in-house chatbot serving your team. This option is associated with some disadvantages, including the limited configuration and the dependence on the service. Some popular platforms for building chatbots are:
Facebook is among the leading networks for consumers to directly interact with their choice of brand. Over a billion people in a month use this platform to directly get in touch with businesses. A survey reveals that 56% of consumers would prefer any and all form of grievances to be addressed and solved via chat rather than telephonically. Furthermore, consumers expect the response time to be less than 5 minutes per grievance.
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.
This particular tool also specializes in personalization. Implement ZoConvert and make personalized updates, conversations, interactions with bots minutely picking on the customer behavior, pattern and interaction. With ZoConvert you can Broadcast your messages which results in better open and click rate. You can also create your own flows and make changes depending on your marketing strategies and send personalized updates at the same time.
24/7 digital support. An instant and always accessible assistant is assumed by the more and more digital consumer of the new era.[36] Unlike humans, chatbots once developed and installed don't have a limited workdays, holidays or weekends and are ready to attend queries at any hour of the day. It helps to the customer to avoid waiting of a company's agent to be available. Thus, the customer doesn't have to wait for the company executive to help them. This also lets companies keep an eye on the traffic during the non-working hours and reach out to them later.[43]
Enter Roof Ai, a chatbot that helps real-estate marketers to automate interacting with potential leads and lead assignment via social media. The bot identifies potential leads via Facebook, then responds almost instantaneously in a friendly, helpful, and conversational tone that closely resembles that of a real person. Based on user input, Roof Ai prompts potential leads to provide a little more information, before automatically assigning the lead to a sales agent.
Think of a message thread as the place where you connect and interact with your users. Build just one bot, and your experience is available on all platforms where Messenger exists, including iOS, Android, and web. It also removes the friction of your users having to download one more app, on top of all the apps they already have and may not use, given Messenger is now used by 900 million people every month.
