A chatbot is basically a program used to run an online chat conversation through either text or voice-to-voice, instead of giving direct physical contact to a real person. In the past, chat bots were great for interactive educational environments, but their effectiveness is starting to fade as the internet becomes more impersonal. Today, chat bots still have a place in some educational settings, particularly ones that require a student to share some personal information or interact with others. However, the main reason why chat bots are starting to become obsolete is that people are spending more of their time online without ever leaving their living rooms. This has caused chat bot technologies to change drastically, resulting in many of the newer chatbot programs being unable to understand basic commands like "help".
It is not uncommon to encounter an automated customer service chatbot these days. These chat bots work just like actual customer service representatives, except they are not. Instead of asking a question, the user of the chatbot responds directly to the computer. Most of these chatbot technology solutions are set up so that the customer service representative can perform a pre-written script, which will be sent directly back to the bot in order to make a suitable response. The problem with most chatbot systems is that these scripts are often written by humans who don't have the appropriate experience or knowledge in order to properly respond to specific questions, which results in most of the customers complaining that the bot cannot properly help them.
Chat Bots are also commonly known as NLP (Neural Linguistic Programming) chat bots, or NLP robots. Basically, an NLP chat bot is a program that uses recorded human conversations in order to predict and perform different responses based on the recorded conversations. In other words, this means that a chat bot is able to "think" based on recorded conversations. The interesting thing about this is that a completely automated and perfectly intelligent system can be built using nothing more than basic information and the skills required to use basic computer software. So basically, we are creating a perfect, fully functional artificial intelligence system that can think, reason, and respond in different ways based on pre-programmed information and responses.
Google recently purchased two chatbot developers in order to increase the size of their artificial intelligence team, which according to the company is already working on over 50 projects. In total, Google now has four different chatbot developers and four different NLP developers working on different tasks. Each one of these companies specializes in either one of two fields are Web Customer Service and/or NLP. Google's newest bot, named Phoebe, is an NLP chatbot that customers seem to love.
Phoebe is responsible for tracking user conversations in order to provide relevant information about each customer. It is possible that Google plans to further enhance Phoebe with its live agent feature. Google's live agents will be tasked with multiple conversations at once, which may not include their customer's questions. For example, they might be chatting with a user about their day and then ask them questions about the weather the next day, or where they need to go for dinner. Google's new chatbot can actually answer questions about their customer's needs.
Google's Chat Bot also performs research on the internet. It can check the number of searches each keyword gets over a given time period and find anomalies in search engine results. Google's Chat Bot can also look for particular terms and see if it can find out anything interesting or valuable from the results. It might tell Google users that their searches are "better" than competitors' searches, but it might also tell them that competitors have better ads and landing pages. The research task helps the Chat Bot better serve its customers by providing relevant and helpful information.
The latest addition to Google's Chat Bots family is called "Sphoro", which was acquired by Yahoo! This bot was specifically designed to allow Yahoo! customers to better serve their own customers and create more valuable relationships with those customers. Its advanced capabilities include:
These are just some of the many ways chat bots can help customer service agents perform their job. If your company uses chatbot technology, then you should begin investigating these programs. Many companies use chat bots because they save time. Instead of writing emails, faxing documents, calling, scheduling meetings, and carrying paperwork around, most companies use chat Bots to handle all these tasks. In short, it streamlines every aspect of customer service.