Ready To Be Deployed, Chatbots!!! — Part-2

Hey Everyone, So in the last part we discussed what a basic chatbot is, that is

A chatbot is a software that can converse (or chat) by text or text-to-speech, usually with the user of a website, mobile app, and a bunch of other applications.

So, today lets discuss the various types of chatbots. We might not notice but all of us interact with a lot many chatbots daily. The Google Assistant, Alexa, Siri, even the Marvel fame Jarvis, is just a chatbot. These chatbots come in our life in so many forms, that many times, we don’t even notice them. Ever called on a some customer helpline, and a machine answered, which asked for your responses. Yes, those were chatbots only.

We might believe that chatbots are a new thing, but contrary to the popular belief, chatbots are a decade old concept. For Instance, the first chatbot, ELIZA, was first designed at MIT in 1966! The concept is pretty old, it’s just the interest in the technology is comparatively new, with more and more firms and organisations getting interested in the chatbots.

So, now, after this quick introduction with the chatbots in our day to day life, let’s start with the various categories in which we generally divide the chatbots.

1. Scripted Bots:
   These, by far, are the simplest kind of chatbots. As the name suggests, these are pre-scripted, sometimes also called, rule-based chatbots. A scripted bot, simply asks a question to the user and then give them a specific set of answers to choose from, and based on that, the bot responds.
2. NLP-Powered Bots:
   These, NLP-powered chatbots actually use the powerful concepts of Artificial Intelligence and NLP(Natural Language Processing) in the background. But they use these just for understanding the human responses better, they are not much better than the scripted bots, they have a predefined set of flows, but the difference is, they can understand what a user wants to convey. They aren’t just restricted to a set of responses.
3. Service Chatbots:
   This is a special category of chatbots, which are mainly used by industries focusing on human-feedback and inputs. These bots pay attention to some specific action/trigger words, which instructs them to start some action. Hence also called Action Chatbots sometime. For Instance, Google Assistant generally has a list of installed and in use actions with it, any guesses what those actions are?
   Just a hint, try to set an alarm on your phone tonight with the Google Assistant.
4. Social Messaging Chatbots:
   So, how many of you have studied about artificial intelligence in school or in college? What we initially were taught was, what scientists were trying to achieve was, a machine, which when kept in a room, should be so good at mimicking human beings, that a human talking to it from another room should not be able to tell, if it is a machine or a human being, and that’s the aim behind designing most of these social messaging chatbots.
   As suggested by the name, these are mostly available and deployed on some social media platforms, where, they are trained to interact with the normal users, as if they themselves are humans as well. These can be developed by the hackers or the organisations(trying to save up the human efforts) or sometimes just some fun loving developers. But whosoever, released those, these chatbots are present in our connections(most of the time), sometimes, known, and at others, well.
5. Machine Learning Powered Chatbots:
   As I said in the beginning, Google Assistant, Alexa, Siri etc. all of these are chatbots only. But then, how and why are they so powerful, they know we want to say, they almost know us better than many of our friends. Well, the reason is, they are powered by machine learning, and deep learning, a lot many things like those are working in the background for these chatbots. These are one of the most advanced ones, that have ever existed, or atleast which are readily available to us.
   These chatbots are like, as if they can think on their own. They know our schedules, they process those, and based on our liking and other factors, they can even suggest stuff to us.
6. Voice Enabled Chatbots:
   As we are already talking about the Assistant, Alexa and Siri, we already are familiar with the voice enabled chatbots. But there are many other chatbots as well, which are voice enabled. Even there are many tools which help us to generate ready to be deployed chatbots, which infact are voice enabled as well. Which is safe to say, for now, as good as they get.
   We can simply say anything and they’ll act on our behalf, just on our word.

So, These are some of the genres in which we can divide the chatbots, but these are not hard and fast genres, and different people can categorise them based on different factors. But these are some, by which, I like to categories them, in order to understand them better.

Next in the coming blog, we will be discussing about the advantages of using these chatbots for different businesses, and their use cases, in as much depth as possible with the limited number of words.