Translated material
What is a chatbot and how does it work?
Content:
The material was updated in December 2021. “Bot” (reduction from “robot”) is a program that imitates human activities. The chatbot imitates the interlocutor in the chat. Who and for what came up with a chatbot? And why are they becoming more popular?
The first experiments on creating such programs began half a century ago. One of the successful examples of giving interaction with the machine of the illusion of human communication is Eliza . This chatbot written in 1966 imitates a dialogue with a psychotherapist.
Once in the most popular ICQ messenger there were dozens of bots. They performed the functions of a collection of jokes, translator, calculator who sent a weather forecast, currencies, news, movie aafish, etc. on request or schedule, etc. To solve elementary problems, the user did not need to leave the messenger and open the browser-often they were blocked in the offices or limited external web traffic.
Today, chat bots are capable of and everywhere replace the support services of all kinds of services. You called the military registration and enlistment office. If you want to serve in the army-click the star, do not want to-click the lattice: elementary telephone bout. Order tickets, call a taxi, make a payment or transfer, build a route, download a movie or music will also help bots. The Bo-legalist , written by a 19-year-old Briton, helped car owners to challenge fines of $ 3 million.
All this could be done in different ways and without bots, what is the reason for such an interest in them recently? The market for mobile applications is oversaturated. Their account went to millions, but users are no longer eager to establish something new. According to Comscore, 80% of time users spend only three applications. Against this background, the messengers segment continues to grow actively.
Last year, the total audience of the most popular of them overtook social networks. Messengers are private, require less resources, work on cheaper devices. In addition, unlike social networks, they have not yet been clogged with unnecessary information, intrusive advertising and other people's news.
As a result, it became obvious to the developers of the services that it was easier to get to the user in the program that he has already installed and open daily than to convince him of the need to work with a separate application. The chat boot does not require traffic for downloading, the installation time, does not take up space in the memory and on the smartphone screen. Thus began the boom of chat bots.
Working with a chat boot is simple: you need to add it to the contact list and start correspondence. Most often, in response, the bot will send information about himself, a list of available commands. Or it will display the buttons to the screen that turn the dialog box into an intuitive mini-application.
Reviews of new bots regularly appear in the media, as about five years ago this happened with new Appsstore applications. It is more convenient to use special bots catalogs. For example, Telegram Bot Store , where bots are ranked in popularity, freshness, languages and categories. The development of the ecosystem of bots is the issue of the near future. Bot stores should appear in the messengers, and the one who finds himself in the ranks of the pioneers will win.
Bots are unlikely to kill the application market, as loud headlines promise. However, they will surely take a large share from the call center industry. Sony Pictures has already replaced 70 employees with one chat boot. The redistribution of traffic in favor of bots is expected in areas of e -commerce and information services.
To make a simple chatbot, it’s enough to understand the platform itself, which offers to create this chatbot, and then look and study. Here I will probably compare with Flash. Remember, about 15-20 years ago, Flash was terribly popular, and it was easy to draw an animation. But to program it so that there all kinds of algorithms spin - it was already difficult.
In addition, intrigue reserves the active development of artificial intelligence technologies and language processing. The network can change significantly if the chat bots learn to do something that sites and applications are not yet able to.