A Chatbot – What Is It?
- bot
- chatbot
So I finally made a chatbot for myself. Hooray! I'm going to talk about DJBot on my next post. So keep posted!
But hey, wait! “A chatbot?”, you might be asking. “What's that?”. Uh oh! I feel like you've been left out my friend; hopefully not.
I'm not really going to talk in depth about what's a chatbot and and its purpose, I'm just going to give you an idea about it. 'Kay?
Simply put a chatbot is a service, powered by rules and sometimes artificial intelligence, that you interact with via a chat interface.
Well, that wasn't so clear right? Perhaps you've only grasped the last part, “a chat interface” so you might be thinking about WhatsApp, Facebook's Messenger, Viber, LINE and insert your favorite messaging platform. Yes, they live on those platforms and all you have to do is chat to them and they usually act like an assistant capable of understanding what you need.
Sweet!
In case you haven't wrapped your head around it yet, here's a more precise example that will blow surely your mind.
What if you want to book a flight from NY to Atlanta?
The typical way that you'll most probably do this is by going to your awesome flight website and search for that flight of yours and select from a list of schedules and so and so, until you booked a flight, done. Easy enough?
But what if you just say and type in,
“hey! book me a flight from NY to Atlanta tomorrow at 3pm”
in FB Messenger and boom, all done and you'll get a response back,
“Your flight has been booked. Here's your itinerary Mr. Dorell for your reference.”
How convenient that can get?
All of these trouble of having for us to determine what should we do from here to that is put in the service side of a chatbot. For chatbots to be usable, they must at least do what they're supposed to do very well and that includes understanding the users request either from starting out from a small talk or directly initiating on the users intent in our case above, “book a flight”.
I think that's more than enough for me talking about chatbots. I'll leave it up for you to search the web for more about it. They're hotter than pancakes!