If you've ever used a customer support live chat service, you've probably experienced that vague, sneaky suspicion that the "person" you're chatting with might actually be a robot. Like the extremely stiff robots we've seen in countless movies – tragic, pitiful machines tortured by their painfully restricted emotional range, vainly hoping to achieve a greater degree of humanity – chatbots often seem almost human, but not quite do. Their speech is clumsy, the pace is somewhat off.
Love them or hate them, chatbots are here to stay. Chatbots have become extremely popular in recent years, largely due to dramatic advances in machine learning and other underlying technologies such as natural language processing. Today's cell phone number list chatbots are smarter, more responsive, and more helpful - and we're likely to see even more of them in the years to come. In this article, we'll look at 10 of the most innovative ways businesses are using them. We'll explore why chatbots have become such a popular marketing technology, as well as the broader and often unspoken impacts these concepts promise to have on the way we communicate, do business and interact with each other online.
What are chatbots?
Chatbots - also known as "chatbots" - are software applications that mimic written or spoken human speech with the aim of simulating a conversation or interaction with a real person. Chatbots are offered to visitors in two main ways: through web applications or standalone applications. Today, chatbots are most often used in the customer service space, taking on roles traditionally held by living, breathing human beings such as Tier 1 support agents and customer satisfaction representatives.
Chatbots are becoming much more mainstream in part because the barriers to entry into creating chatbots (i.e. sophisticated programming knowledge and other highly specialized technical skills) are becoming more and more unnecessary. Today you can create your own chatbot that you can use in Facebook Messenger, for example - all without expensive computer science degrees or even a lot of prior coding experience - and there are several sites that offer the ability to create rudimentary chatbots using simple drag-and-drop interfaces.
How do chatbots work?
At the heart of chatbot technology is natural language processing or NLP, the same technology that forms the basis of voice recognition systems used by virtual assistants such as Google Now, Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana. Chatbots process text presented to them by the user (a process called “analysis”), before responding through a complex series of algorithms that interprets and identifies what the user has said, infers what they wants to say and/or what they want and determine a series of appropriate responses based on this information.