What is a chatbot?

Data Science, AI and ML
#1

A chatbot is an artificial intelligence (AI) program that can simulate a conversation (or a chat) with a user in natural language through messaging applications, websites, mobile applications or by phone.

An example. You want to buy some shoes from your local retail store, you have to access their website, find what you are looking for and buy it. But what if that store had a bot? It would only be necessary to write a message to the brand through Facebook and tell them what we want. And if you had doubts about size measurements you could gt answers to your problem in a moment.

One of the great advantages of chatbots is that, unlike applications, they are not downloaded, it is not necessary to update them and they do not take up space in the phone’s memory. Another one is that we can have several bots integrated in the same chat.
This way we would avoid jumping from one app to another according to what we need at each moment. The consequences? More pleasant user experiences and faster and simpler customer service interactions.

Why are chatbots important? A chatbot is often described as one of the most advanced and promising expressions of human-machine interaction. However, from a technological point of view, a chatbot only represents the natural evolution of a response system to questions that takes advantage of natural language processing (NLP).

The formulation of answers to questions in natural language is one of the most typical examples of natural language processing applied in companies.

So, what is a chatbot? It is a piece of software that is designed to automate a specific task. More specifically, a chatbot is essentially a conversational user interface that can be connected to a series of data sources through an API so that it can offer information or services on demand, such as weather forecasts, breaking news, status updates o order information.