All that’s Abuzz in the World of Chatbots

You are not alone if you wish you went to the world of “The Jetsons” and enjoyed the high-tech lifestyle promised by the Jetsons’ robot maid Rosie. What a spectacular thing to imagine!

However, no longer will it be called a dream impossible to achieve, because legions of such ‘helpful’ robots are finally here to make our lives better than ever. Being one such helpful robot, the chatbot has successfully hogged the limelight by conferring a splendiferous experience as an automated interactive agent.

According to Oracle, by the year 2020, more than 80 % of businesses are expected to have a chatbot. Also, as reported by Grand View Research, the market is expected to grow at a compounded rate of around 25 % for the next few years, reaching a value of more than $1 billion by 2025.

The proliferation of AI is in a full swing now, and the chatbots are a little splash on the colossal wave of proliferation. Exhibiting the perfect concoction of advanced technology and computer programming, chatbot or smartbot or chatterbot has created a stirring ripple all across the globe.

A chat robot, in short chatbot usually conjures the image of a high-tech ‘genie in a bottle’, which is meticulously crafted to communicate through instant messaging by artificially replicating the pattern of human conversations.

From booking a flight ticket to buying a cell phone, from playing your favorite music to finding a nearby eatery in town, from knowing the weather report to keep a tab on the latest sports update, a chatbot can help you accomplish almost every rudimentary task with utmost ease.

Read on if you are intrigued to traverse the world of chatbot.

What’s a Chatbot and how does it Work?

Bored of the same old way of accessing the information on the Internet? Perhaps it’s time that you brought a change to your entire information accessing experience with the excellence of a chatbot. A chatbot has entered the market to heist the glory of automated interaction by redefining artificial intelligence and computer program.

This automated computer program is designed to stimulate online interaction with people to resolve their queries or accomplish their tasks. Fundamentally, a chatbot enables interaction between a machine and a human. The communication takes place via a read message or a voice option.

A chatbot is meticulously programmed to work independently from its human operator. Just like a human being, it can resolve any query formulated to it in a natural language.

You must be wondering what mechanism plays a pivotal role in making a chatbot work. Well, it comes up with all the answers with a combination of the pre-defined scripts and machine learning. When the user hurls a query at a chatbot, it will respond on the basis of what it knows at that point in time.

If the interaction brings a chatbot to a place where it does not know what to do, it will eventually differ or pass the conversation on to a human operator. In both cases, it will try to learn the unknown things from that interaction. Over the course of time as well as different interactions, the chatbot will gain relevance and scope.

A chatbot’s complexity is majorly determined by the sophistication of its underlying software and the data it’s meant to access. If it’s not connected to the relevant data, its usability will witness a steep fall.

Upcoming Trends for Chatbots

Escalating with the evolution in modern technology, the field of chatbot development is bucking up to embrace some of these following trends in the years to come. Even though there might not be a rapid paradigm shift in the usage of AI, a couple of new landmarks are expected to roll out in chatbot development.

Automated Chatbot Testing

With each passing day, the chatbots are increasingly becoming way more intense than ever. Today, it will not be a big deal to build a project that has around 100 intents, and the complexity of the interaction itself would be 100s of condition and decision points in the dialog. In order to keep a chatbot updated, it’s essential to maintain a real case scenario. The importance of adding new intents, branches, and synonyms in the conversation is paramount if you want the bot to be at the peak of usability and efficacy.

The Rise of Enterprise Bots

The emergence of numerous enterprise bots could be another anticipated trend in chatbot development. The new-age entrepreneurs will be the main driving force behind the rise of enterprise bots. In several cases, many companies do not succeed to onboard clients for their bots that they are dealing with. However, to meet their internal purposes, these companies can reap the benefits of different bots. This is, in fact, could turn out to be a major market goal for the upcoming years.

SMS and Website Bots to Gain Popularity

Despite having boasted of a grand introduction, a few chatbots are still incapable of getting a notch higher in terms of their popularity or advancement. This fact bodes true for both the Facebook and WhatsApp messenger bots. However, the upcoming years are expected to witness the sky-rocketing popularity of several other chatbots including, SMS bots, website bots, and the likes. In the near future, these bots might be able to gain discernibly huge momentum.

Bots might be Reigning over Apps

Almost every enterprise hub yearns for optimum security in terms of their data privacy. With each passing year, this yearning is expected to get even a notch higher. There might be a major concern about letting large players such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc. own their own confidential and conversational data. In the upcoming years, it’s expected to witness the emergence of a wide repertoire of on-premise chatbots, which will ensure data privacy for different eminent business hubs.

The Inclusion of Engines in Chatbots

As the cursory level of AI chatbots has already seeped into the soil of human civilization, the bots have been reigning supreme in almost every aspect of every millennial’s life. Be it for communicating with each other, organizing different events, ordering food, planning vacations, or arranging the calendar, the users are increasingly relying on the AI bots.

Bots will Come to the Rescue

That day is not far when a chatbot is going to make all the searching for you. Coupled with Google, the bots will help the users find the right piece of information, albeit, without consuming much time. It’s expected that the bots are going to be coupled with more advanced Natural Language Processing Language, owing to which they will obtain a better understanding of contexts and languages. As a result of this, a bot can understand a search better, thus providing more specific and context-based information.

Just Imagine If a Chatbot Could Talk

Currently, asking a bot for any information is a one-way street. That day is not very far when a chatbot can be able to ask the users more specific queries to find the most suitable information or replies for them. This could enable a chatbot to answer even the hardest of queries within a shorter span of time.

Blog Posts Might be a Passé

Looking at the skyrocketing popularity of a chatbot, it won’t be exaggerating to state that a bot could possibly undermine the importance of those blog posts that are especially aimed at depicting different personalized stories. Everyone has their own ways of communicating their thoughts.

Using particular syntax, words, diction, and tones, we voice our thoughts in our own distinctive way. The importance of words is paramount in communication, and the chatbots will soon be enough advanced to impersonate human voices. These interactive agents could be able to communicate with us in the same way we speak to each other.

The Perks of Choosing a Bot

Those truckloads of benefits offered by a chatbot are nothing short of extraordinary. We have dug out some of the biggest benefits of a chatbot.

Chatbots are those virtual robots that never get tired of obeying their user’s commands. A bot can operate almost every day without taking any break.
Since a chatbot can continue to obey its users’ commands in a continuous and consistent manner, an entrepreneur can boost his/her customer UX with great ease.
Unlike a human communicator who can only interact with a limited number of humans at a time, a chatbot can simultaneously interact with a thousand people.
Chatbots are extremely flexible, and hence, they could be used in any industry. Unlike other products that require being developed and tested to upgrade their platforms, the bots are a lot easier to switch. One needs to train a bot just by offering it the right instruction and flow to switch its prevalent industry or field.
What would you do if you meet someone who does not know how to behave properly? How would you react if someone hurls abusive or foul language at you while talking to you? He/she may not succeed to keep trying your patience for a long time! Unlike you or any other human communicator, a chatbot will not ‘react’ even if it gets mistreated or bombarded with tonnes of abusive words. It’s as cool as a cucumber simply because it’s a machine, which has zero emotion.
It can never be affordable to hire a human for accomplishing any task. Also, a human employee is only capable of dealing with just one or two people at a time. This is where the importance of chatbots comes into play. It’s capable of interacting with many people at the same time. This way, it can decrease the expenses and trigger a steep rise in customer satisfaction.
When given a recurring task, anyone would feel less productive accomplishing that. Chatbots can automate any task that needs to be done on a frequent basis. In fact, it will never get tired of doing any repetitive task.
A chatbot could serve as an excellent personal assistant. This means that you could rely on a bot to meet any requirement. For instance, a fashion bot could help you pick the right clothes. From a finance bot, you can obtain the best of trading suggestions. A travel bot can suggest to you the best travel destinations in the world.

Do Bots Have any Shortcoming?

Yes, a chatbot does have its own share of shortcomings as well! Here are some of its major drawbacks:

Due to a complex interface, a chatbot might often consume a lot of time to understand a user’s requisites.
The fixed programs of a chatbot could be the reason for a customer’s dissatisfaction.
A chatbot can improve customer interaction but at the cost of consuming his/her time.
Chatbots lack the capacity to memorize any past conversation.

Meet Some of the World’s Most Famous Bots

Xiaolce – The most technically sophisticated Microsoft bot
Amazon’s Alexa – The most financially successful chatbot
Google Assistant – This holistic digital concierge is available on Android phone
Woebot – A cost-free therapy chatbot
Uber Chatbot – A bot for a safe transportation
Swiggy bot – A bot for a hassle-free doorstep food delivery service
Clippy – Microsoft’s Clippy can serve as a perfect office assistant
Duolingo – A language learning app to help the users learn different languages like French, Spanish, German, Swedish, etc.
TechCrunch bot – A bot that can help you tap into any news or story you want to tap into
Hip Munk – A bot for travel advice, destination recommendations, etc.
Pizza Hut – A user can order pizza using his/her Facebook messenger or Twitter account.

It’s Time for a Wrap

Well, this is just the cursory level! We are yet to witness the global explosion of chatbots in the years to come. However, given the aforementioned tête-à-tête, it will not be exaggerating to say…

Forget app, now the chatbots take over!