Feb 10, 2023
9 min read
Chatbots are common these days, with many websites and companies relying on them for customer support and other automated functions. In this article, we’ll explain how AI chatbots work, weigh up their pros and cons, and explore the future of chatbot technology.
Contents
A chatbot is an AI text generator that can simulate human conversation and respond to user input in real time.
Artificial intelligence chat tools are becoming increasingly popular as online customer service solutions. From small businesses to major government agencies, organizations at all levels now rely on chatbot technology to at least partially facilitate user support. Instead of relying on human-staffed customer contact centers to answer phones and emails, administrators can set up AI chatbots to resolve complaints or provide help.
Chatbots aren’t just used to automate customer care, of course. Any piece of software that can “talk” to a user and respond to varied inputs in a conversational manner could be considered a chatbot.
To really define a chatbot, it’s important to understand how this technology actually works.
Chatbots work in a variety of ways, depending on how complex their software is. The simplest form of chatbot is really just a basic word-recognition system. These are the bots behind the “live chat” widgets you probably notice in the corner of many websites these days.
These basic bots may try to pass themselves off as intelligent, but they’re really just scanning your messages for keywords. If you want to pay an internet bill and can’t find the right page on your provider’s website, you might explain this to its chatbot. Thanks to its primitive preprograming, the bot notices that you’ve used the words “pay” and “bill” and suggests a page that you can visit to pay your bill. It’s useful, but it’s hardly advanced technology.
At the other end of the spectrum, we have genuine AI chatbots. These systems use machine learning to constantly improve their neural networks, allowing them to become ever more sophisticated in how they process conversational data and make associations between words and concepts. The most notable recent example of this technology is ChatGPT, OpenAI’s latest chatbot.
Chatbots like ChatGPT convincingly simulate conversation, can present well-constructed arguments and ideas, and may produce passages of text that are practically indistinguishable from those written by human beings. Thanks to their natural language processing systems and deep learning algorithms, these chatbots are extremely articulate and responsive to the person they’re talking to.
Many programs can be described loosely as chatbots, and these usually fall into three broad categories.
Button chatbots (also known as menu chatbots) are the simplest form of bots. They present the user with buttons or menus and, depending on the user responses, direct them to a solution for their problem. These button-based bots are popular with booking systems, where the user can, for example, select time slots for a dinner reservation. The bot is then able to communicate their responses to a booking system. These bots work great for repetitive tasks, like taking bookings, carrying out surveys, or processing simple help requests.
Linguistic or rule-based chatbots are more complex than button bots, though they fall short of the nuanced and relevant responses that AI bots provide. Linguistic models are based on preprogrammed rulesets. For example, a rule could be that when a bot receives a certain number of keywords related to a specific topic, it provides the user with a link to a webpage that may help to resolve their query. Like button or keyword-based bots, they still rely on static, preset rules, but the user experience is more flexible.
The most advanced form of chatbot is the deep learning model. These systems continually improve with interaction – the more people use them, the more data they collect about how to talk like a human, make natural word associations, and avoid past mistakes. The speed at which deep learning systems are advancing is remarkable, with today’s chatbots able to engage in convincing, long-form dialogue, create complex and well-constructed essays, and even write simple code.
Millions of chatbots are active on the internet today, but here are a few notable examples.
Chatbots have many use cases, from answering customer questions to debugging code. Here are some ways in which they can be employed effectively.
Chatbots have some obvious advantages and disadvantages which need to be weighed up before we can decide whether this technology is a net benefit or not.
Even without the capacity to engage in meaningful conversations, advanced AI bots could allow businesses to scale content production, build new software applications, and troubleshoot technical difficulties, all while cutting back on expenditure. These bots also improve customer service experiences, allowing for rapid responses and query resolution.
At the same time, chatbots can be used for malicious purposes. A hacker could set up a Facebook chatbot to target people in social engineering attacks, without having to engage with victims directly. A political operative could spread misinformation and fake news with a Twitter chatbot. AI-driven scams are already a problem thanks to deepfake video technology, and chatbots will only heighten these threats.
Regardless of the negatives, however, chatbots are clearly here to stay, so what does the future hold for this technology?
Chatbots are only going to become more dynamic and advanced in the future. As their operational efficiency improves, these programs will be able to carry out complex tasks at speeds simply impossible for humans to attain.
Chatbots will almost certainly become the main system for customer support, with companies relying on human intervention only in very specific cases where a bot is unable to resolve an issue fully. While current chatbots may lack the agility of a human customer care expert, this is just a temporary issue. The technology may soon reach a point at which customers can no longer distinguish between humans and chatbots.
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