Chatbot is one of the emerging technologies leading the agenda in 2016. Microsoft launched “Tay” in March 16. Facebook announced in April 2016 that businesses would be able to provide chatbots to deliver automated customer support via its “Messenger” services. Other providers include IBM and Microsoft are also providing development platforms to develop the chatbots.
A bot is a piece of software that is designed to automate a specific task. A chatbot is a computer program which conducts a conversation via auditory or textual methods. Such programs are often designed to convincingly simulate how a human would behave as a conversational partner. Some chatbots use sophisticated natural language processing systems, but many simpler systems can scan for keywords within the input, then pull a reply with the most matching keywords, or the most similar wording pattern, from a database.
More recently, chatbots have worked as a user interface which can be plugged into a number of data sources via APIs, so they can deliver information or services on demand, such as weather forecasts or breaking news. Chatbots are working as connectors between the users and the apps. The following image describes the potential functions of the chatbots:
Read the full report of “Chatbot Overview”.
IT Innovation Centre worked on the experiment of using the chatbot to automate some of the services for the IT Service Desk. The experiment used
a chatbot to answer users’ queries, according to the complexity of the problem either provide users with the answers or help users to email and call the service desk.