What are chatbots? what are it's importance?

Have you ever noticed a pop up that comes as a chatbox when you access a bank, e-commerce or any educational websites? So, what are those? These are chatbots, They serve major purposes like providing online customer service, resolving issues and answering simple questions.

What are chatbots?

Chatbots are also called Chat-Robots; these are software application used to conduct an online conversation through text or text to speech. There can be two types of chatbots, the first one uses the instruction given to it to interact with the user, here every answer is identified by certain keyword and the response is given accordingly. The second type uses AI (Artificial Intelligence) that can simulate a conversation with the user in the natural language. The main function of the chatbot involves developing interaction between machines and humans.

Amazon Alexa, ELIZA, LiveChat, Siri and Facebook messenger are some of the most common chatbots used by people.

How do chatbots work?

The chatbots take input from the user, the entire data source of the chatbot is matched with the user's request and then a suitable reply is given to the user. The chatbots work by adopting three classification methods which are as follows

Pattern Matching

Bots use pattern matching to classify the text and produce a suitable response for the customers. Pattern matching also involves the use of Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML )

Algorithms

For each kind of question, a unique pattern must be available in the database to provide a suitable response. With a lot of combination of patterns, it creates a hierarchical structure. We use algorithms to reduce the classifiers and generate a more manageable structure.

Artificial Neural Networks

Neural networks are a way of calculating the output from the input using weighted connections which are calculated from the repeated iterations while training the data amends the weight resulting in the output with accuracy.

What is the importance of chatbots?

Today the need for chatbot has skyrocketed, they are considered of utmost importance in customer satisfaction as they give a better understanding of the interface of the website or application, they answer the query of customer individually, They tell the steps for the required course of action as per the request and also give suggestion based on their preferences.