Everything you need to know

What Is A Chatbot?

A chatbot is a service, powered by rules and sometimes artificial intelligence, that you interact with via a chat interface. The service could be any number of things, ranging from functional to fun, and it could live in any major chat product (Facebook Messenger , Slack, Telegram, Text Messages, etc.).

Examples of Chatbots

Buying shoes is not the only thing chatbots can be used for. Here are a couple of other examples:

• Weather bot . Get the weather whenever you ask.
• Grocery bot . Help me pick out and order groceries for the week.
• News bot . Ask it to tell you when ever something interesting happens.
• Life advice bot . I’ll tell it my problems and it helps me think of solutions.
• Personal finance bot . It helps me manage my money better.
• Scheduling bot . Get me a meeting with someone on the Messenger team at Facebook.
• A bot that’s your friend . In China there is a bot called Xiaoice, built by Microsoft, that over 20 million people talk to.

Why Chatbots Are Such A Big Opportunity?

You are probably wondering  “Why does anyone care about chatbots? They look like simple text based services … what’s the big deal?”

Great question.  I’ll tell you why people care about chatbots.

It’s because for the first time ever  people are using messenger apps more than they are using social networks.

Let that sink in for a second.

People are using messenger apps more than they are using social networks.

So, logically, if you want to build a business online, you want to build where the people are. That place is now inside messenger apps.

“Major shifts on large platforms should be seen as an opportunities for distribution. That said, we need to be careful not to judge the very early prototypes too harshly as the platforms are far from complete. I believe Facebook’s recent launch is the beginning of a new application platform for micro application experiences. The fundamental idea is that customers will interact with just enough UI, whether conversational and/or widgets, to be delighted by a service/brand with immediate access to a rich profile and without the complexities of installing a native app, all fueled by mature advertising products. It’s potentially a massive opportunity.” — Aaron Batalion, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners

This is why chatbots are such a big deal. It’s potentially a huge business opportunity for anyone willing to jump headfirst and build something people want.

How Chatbots Work

There are two types of chatbots, one functions based on a set of rules, and the other more advanced version uses machine learning.

What does this mean?

Chatbot that functions based on rules:

• This bot is very very limited. It can only respond to very specific commands. If you say the wrong thing, it doesn’t know what you mean.
• This bot is only as smart as it is programmed to be.

Chatbot that functions using machine learning:

• This bot has an artificial brain AKA artificial intelligence. You don’t have to be ridiculously specific when you are talking to it. It understands language, not just commands.
• This bot continuously gets smarter as it learns from conversations it has with people.

Bots are created with a purpose. A store will likely want to create a bot that helps you purchase something, where someone like Comcast might create a bot that can answer customer support questions.

Artificial Intelligence

So, if these bots use artificial intelligence to make them work well… isn’t that really hard to do? Don’t I need to be an expert at artificial intelligence to be able to build something that has artificial intelligence?

Short answer? No, you don’t have to be an expert at artificial intelligence to create an awesome chatbot that has artificial intelligence. Just make sure to not over promise on your application’s abilities. If you can’t make the product good with artificial intelligence right now, it might be best to not put it in yet.

However, over the past decade quite a bit of advancements have been made in the area of artificial intelligence, so much in fact that anyone who knows how to code can incorporate some level of artificial intelligence into their products.