What’s a Chatbot? The simplest definition of Chatbot will be; a computer program that can respond to real human queries and have a real-life conversation, just like a human-to-human interaction. Artificial Intelligence and machine learning integrated chatbots are powerful ones that can answer almost every question within some limitation and have a real-life human-like conversation without losing any context of the conversation.
Previously chatbots were limited to a set of questions answered, mostly like a Frequently Answer Question (FAQ) but now with the advanced integration of AI and ML enabling them to learn from the experiences and improve over time which makes them contextually sound for conversations.
Chatbots have improved a lot over time. Artificial Intelligence has enabled a lot of features in bots and is now more advanced in the form of digital assistants which can help one out in almost every query, our very own digital personal assistant.
What is a Facebook Messenger chatbot?
Some of us may have chatted with a chatbot on Facebook messenger. The developers of various chatbots released the chatbots over various social media. One can easily go on the messenger and search for a messenger chatbot and ask questions to it.
One of the examples of messenger chatbot is a medical chatbot on messenger, it can answer queries regarding any medicine and it will provide sufficient details and usage of the medicine. There are symptom checker chatbots also which tells people about the probable disease and probable treatment recommendation based on the symptoms.
What is a chatbot on android?
Some of us may have used and still remember a little about the SimSimi chatbot application on android. It certainly created a lot of hype at that time as it was almost like a flirting machine and could answer a lot of questions. Sometimes it’s fun to have a chatbot answering some flirty queries although it was not much powerful still managed to gain a lot of popularity.
There are some app-based chatbots on android, although social platform-based chatbots have the most popular as they are just one click away on our messenger.
Chatbots Statistics 2020
According to the BusinessInsider report, the chatbot market size in 2019 was $2.6 Billion which is projected to grow up to $9.4 Billion by 2024 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) 29.7%.
From the above-mentioned stat, you can gain the least possible and probable insight into the chatbot market which is already a Billion dollar industry.
Some other interesting stats of chatbots are
- According to Salesforce, 69% consumer prefers chatbots for their speed of communication, chatbots are really fast.
- According to Uberall, 80% of the customers have reported positive customer experience after being engaged with a chatbot for customer service.
- According to Invesp, 67% of world consumers have interacted with a bot for customer service over the past 12 months.
- According to Oracle, 80% of businesses are planning to utilize the potential of chatbots in their business.
- Juniper Research believes that by the time 2022, the success rate of bot interaction will reach over 90 %.
The reason behind stating all these facts is that the chatbot industry is growing very rapidly. Customer Service has always been one of the most important parts of most businesses and a lot of things of a business depends on Customer Relationship Management which was mostly dependent on human to human-based interaction all these years.
As bots are taking place, they are going to replace humans, mostly in the sector of customer service. Chatbots are really fast and with Artificial Intelligence integration, they easily gained the capability to interact more efficiently and these bots even can learn from experiences.
Yeah, I guess it would be fair to say, the customer service sector is going to in controlled by bots as they are fast, intelligent, and most importantly LESS COSTLY.
What is the purpose of the chatbot?
There are several purposes for chatbots. They can serve various services. But the most important purpose of chatbots is CUSTOMER SERVICE.
Customer service, one of the most important parts of any business has always been handled by a real human. There always been some issues regarding the pace and availability where a person is in charge of customer service. Of course, businesses that need to run 24 hours a day has to pay a large sum of money in customer service as more people are required to run a 24h service.
That is where chatbots work like a miracle.
- Availability: Chatbots do not take any break from their services and they do not get tired. Thus puts chatbots in a better position for handling customer queries being available 24hours.
- Cost: The startup and maintenance cost of chatbots are comparatively lower. Once, they are set the upgrade and maintenance cost is really negligible. Though, it would cost a little to set up a bot based on the company needs.
- Understanding better users intent and customer service improvement: The searched queries of customers can easily be analyzed by the company which would help the company understand users intent better
So yeah, chatbots can book a flight ticket, can check your symptoms for the disease, and prescribe common medicine. And it can answer all your queries about a service that you need to know.
What are the different types of Chatbots?
Based on platforms, there are mainly 3 types of chatbots. These are
- Messenger Based/ 3Rd party-based
Web-based and messenger or 3rd party chatbots are really popular these days. When you visit a website that offers various services, you can probably see a chatbot welcoming you; it can be found most of the websites now a day that provides different services.
Messenger bots or 3rd party bots are really popular. The makers of bots release bots on social messenger platforms, like Facebook messenger, Whatsapp, Skype, Kik, etc.
Some of us may have chatted with Zootopia’s crime-solving contextualized chatbot which Disney used for promoting the movie and gained huge popularity.
Apart from platforms, there are some other types of chatbots out there, some of these are:
- Scripted bots or Quick Reply bots: They are super fast as they interact with customers based on the predetermined questions.
- NLP (Natural Language Processing) chatbots: These bots can understand user intention. They can provide the most accurate answer based on the user’s intention by analyzing their inputs.
- Service Chatbots: These bots are more for service purposes like checking flight tickets or booking one, responds better to service queries.
- Contextualized chatbots: One of the drawbacks or problems with earlier versions of bots is that, they used to get lost in the middle of a conversation; they couldn’t connect to the context of user queries. It was difficult for chatbots to understand the context of user queries. But now, AI-powered chatbots using NLP and Machine Learning can understand the context and interact in the most accurate way possible.
What’s a Chatbot? The saddest part about chatbots is that they are replacing real humans and people connected with customer service jobs may get replaced by chatbots as it cuts down the operating cost with greater availability.