What Exactly is a Chatbot?

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

A chatbot is often described as one of the most advanced and promising expressions of interaction between humans and machines. However, from a technological point of view, a chatbot only represents the natural evolution of a Question Answering system leveraging Natural Language Processing (NLP). Formulating responses to questions in natural language is one of the most typical Examples of Natural Language Processing applied in various enterprises’ end-use applications.

How does a chatbot work?

There are two different tasks at the core of a chatbot:

User Request Analysis

This is the first task that a chatbot performs. It analyzes the user’s request to identify the user intent and to extract relevant entities.

Returning the Response

Once the user’s intent has been identified, the chatbot must provide the most appropriate response for the user’s request. The answer may be:

• a generic predefined text
• a text retrieved from a knowledge base that contains different answers
• a contextualized piece of information based on data the user has provided
• data stored in enterprise systems
• the result of an action that the chatbot performed by interacting with one or more backend application
• a disambiguating question that helps the chatbot to correctly understand the user’s request

Why chatbots are important

Chatbot applications streamline interactions between people and services, enhancing customer experience. At the same time, they offer companies new opportunities to improve the customers engagement process and operational efficiency by reducing the typical cost of customer service.

To be successful, a chatbot solution should be able to effectively perform both of these tasks. Human support plays a key role here: Regardless of the kind of approach and the platform, human intervention is crucial in configuring, training and optimizing the chatbot system.