Conversations made easier, faster & secure with ‘Chatbots’!!! - Everything you need to know…

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Conversations made easier, faster & secure with ‘Chatbots’!!!
-     Everything you need to know…

Introduction:

In most recent days, one of the technologies which were most aggressively hyped is about Chatbots. These are software applications that mimic written or spoken human speech for the purposes of simulating a conversation or interaction with a real person. It’s also known as a spy, Instant Messaging (IM) bot, chatterbot, conversational interface, Conversational AI, talk bot or artificial spy entity is an AI software that can simulate a conversation with a user in natural language through messaging applications, websites, mobile apps or through the telephone. There are two primary ways chatbots are offered: via web-based applications or standalone apps. A chatbot is often described as one of the most sophisticated, advanced and promising expressions of interaction between humans and machines.

Chatbot applications streamline interactions between people and services, enhancing customer experience. At the same time, they offer companies new opportunities to improve the customer's engagement process and operational efficiency by reducing the typical cost of customer service.
According to research, the main factors that motivate people to use chatbots are:
  • Productivity and Speed
  • Entertainment and Exuberance
  • Social and Relational factors
  • Curiosity and Content
It is one of the most useful technologies that businesses can rely on, possibly replacing the traditional models and making apps and websites redundant. The most interesting feature of the bots is that they learn from past interactions and become intelligent and smarter over time. There’s a lot to unpack regarding chatbots. Chatbots are versatile and vivid, therefore they’re able to adapt and help solve different and diverse business problems. This technology is still in its infancy, so most bots follow a set of rules programmed by a human via a bot building platform.
How a chatbot works:
There are two types of chatbots, one functions based on a set of rules, and the other more advanced version uses machine learning (or AI or both)
  • Rule-based Chatbots: This bot is very limited. It can only respond to very specific commands. This bot is only as smart as it is programmed to be. It answers questions based on some rules on which it is trained on. The rules defined can be very simple to complex. The bots can handle simple queries but fail to manage complex ones. These bots are the most common. These can hold basic conversations using “if/then” logic. These are effective. The more if/then branches are mapped out, the better experience the user will have and the fewer errors they’ll run into
  • AI Chatbots: This bot has an artificial brain aka AI. It understands language, not just commands. This bot continuously gets smarter as it learns from conversations it has with people. Chatbots process the text presented to them by the user (known as “parsing”), before responding according to a complex series of algorithms. Mainly, they’re becoming more human and naturistic
These bots can be of further two types:
  • Retrieval-based: The chatbot uses some heuristics to select a response from a library of predefined responses. The chatbot uses the message and context of the conversation for selecting the best response from a predefined list of bot messages
  • Generative: Bots can generate the answers and not always replies with one of the answers from a set of answers. This makes them more intelligent as they take word by word from the query and generates the answers

How to build a chatbot?
  • Define Goals: What should a chatbot do? Clearly specify the list of things a chatbot needs to perform
  • Choose a channel to interact with your customers: Be ready for your clients to communicate via your website, apps, Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp or any other platform
  • Choose the way of creation: Readymade Chatbot software or building a custom Chatbot from scratch
  • Create, customize and launch: Describe the algorithm based on its actions, develop a database of answers and test the work of the chatbot

Finally, A Chatbot must be:
  • Able to sense & Sharp to think
  • Quick to act & Read intention
  • Context integration & Coherent responses
By following the best practices, a Chatbot can offer:
  • 24/7 service & Acquiring customer information
  • Be transparent with visitors & Keep messages short and concise
  • Improve customer service & Personalize communication
  • Improve the response rate & Automate repetitive tasks

A Chatbots Intuitive Lexicography:
  • User Request Analysis: This is the first task that a chatbot performs. It analyzes the user’s request to identify the user intent and extract relevant entities
  • Returning the response: Once the user’s intent has been identified, the chatbot must provide the most appropriate response for the user’s request
  • NLP: This focuses on the interactions between human language and computers are. It sits at the intersection of computer science, AI, and computational linguistics. NLP is a way for computers to analyze, understand and derive meaning from human language in a smart and useful way. With NLP, developers can organize and structure knowledge to perform tasks such as automatic summarization, translation, named entity recognition, relationship extraction, sentiment analysis, speech recognition, and topic segmentation
  • Tokenization: It is used to describe the process of converting the normal text strings into a list of tokens i.e., words that we want. The NLP divides a string of words into pieces or tokens that are linguistically symbolic or/ and are differently useful for the application
  • Stemming: It is the process of reducing inflected words to their stem, base or root form — generally a written word form
  • Lemmatization: A slight variant of stemming is lemmatization. It often creates non-existent words, whereas lemmas are actual words
  • Pattern Matches: Bots use pattern matching to classify the text and produce a suitable response for the customers. A standard structure of these patterns is “Artificial Intelligence Markup Language” (AIML)
  • Algorithms: For each kind of question, a unique pattern must be available in the database to provide a suitable response. With lots of permutations and combination on patterns, it creates a hierarchical structure. It reduces the classifiers and generates the more manageable structure
  • Artificial Neural Networks: It is a way of calculating the output from the input using weighted connections which are calculated from repeated iterations while training the data. Each step through the training data amends the weights resulting in the output with accuracy
  • Entities: Entity basically represents a concept in your Chatbot. It might be a payment system in your E-commerce Chatbot or any Food Delivering Menu
  • Intents: A piece of a conversation meant to convey a specific message. It is basically the action chatbot should perform when the user says something
  • Context: When an NLU algorithm analyzes a sentence, it does not have the history of the user conversation
  • Sentiment Analysis: Tries to learn if the user is having a good experience or not based on the behavior, mood, and personality
  • Normalization: It processes the text to find common spelling mistakes or typographical errors that might the user intent to convey
  • Dependency Parsing: The Chatbot looks for the objects and subjects in the user’s text to find dependent and related phrases that users might be trying to convey

Future of Chatbots:
  • Chatbots are currently seen on websites, social platforms, and smartphones and are utilized as easy and fun ways to assist customers in their interactions with a brand.
  • This will fundamentally transform human interactions with digital business platforms and will open new realms of personalized customer experience
  • Even if the bot revolution is in its early phase, we can expect a lot more advancements in this field
  • Chatbots will get embedded in almost all the interconnected devices that we use in our day to day lives
  • The next generation of intelligent chatbots with more power to store, synthesize and recall data can possibly make smart decisions
Advantages:
  • Anytime and anywhere accessibility on any device
  • Appropriate and instant feedback by collecting user information
  • Faster query resolution & Enhanced customer and employee experience
  • Improvement in accuracy and reliability
  • Ability to engage with the customers in a natural and friendly manner 
  • Easy to interact using a simpler interface & Easy to build and cost efficient
  • More people are ready to use chatbots

Disadvantages:
  • Failing to meet expectations
  • The complexities of languages
  • Chatbots are expensive

Applications:
  • Shopping, e-Commerce via chat, analytics, communication, customer support
  • Design, developer tools
  • Education, entertainment, finance
  • Food, games, health
  • HR, marketing, news, personal, productivity, social, sports, travel, and utilities 
Developer Take-A-Ways!

Conclusion:

Chatbots are becoming sophisticated, responsive, and more “natural.” The possibilities are limitless, and emerging ideas are endless!!!
A lot more is there to explore in this technology, and even a lot more concepts keep on evolving with the integrated technologies and lay us a foundation to make the possibilities become true. Many Developers, Organisations and Companies are just beginning to understand what benefits chatbots can bring to them. This technology is still in an early stage, its capabilities continue to increase and the best chatbots have yet to be created. With the evolution of AI technology and deep learning, the chatbots are expected to become more empowered to offer better language processing capabilities and extensive personalization in the coming days.
I’m going to share a bunch of tools for developers at the Developer Take-A-Ways Section of the story, but feel free to comment, share or send me any other interesting videos or links you might have found. ✌ It’s a massive opportunity to work on. I hope you found this article useful.
If you feel like this story was useful or informative and think others should see it too, make sure you hit the ‘Like’👏 button. See you soon! 👋 Bubyee…
Location: Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, India

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