A Chat Bot is an Artificial Intelligence chat robot that works on AI platform. A chat bot is a virtual bot like Alexa and Apple's Siri to solve the human query.

You would have come across entering into many websites and suddenly out of nowhere a pop up appears on the screen asking “How can I help you?” or “Are you looking for any help? I am here to help you”. These are Chatbots designed for particular purposes to communicate with the users, who enter into their websites. These are very popular nowadays, due to the tremendous advancement in Machine learning and Technology. Before dwelling into the question “Does the chatbots were successful in doing their jobs?” let us know what really a chat bot is.

A Chat is a new type of electronic mail that paved way for modern chatbots. Many people of this generation like to chat rather dial-up and speak to a person physically. A chat is just an updated version of SMS since it has certain features like attaching files, media, GIFs, smiley and so on. It is the most popular forms of communication for the younger generation. It is most sought after method of communication because of its seamless connection and exciting features.

The chatbots were claimed to be “The Next Big Thing”. It all started in 2016 when Facebook announced its messenger app is to have automated conversation with its clients regarding businesses and organizations. This is where the hype began. Messaging and texting became stupendous. Many other organizations started to build their own apps and conversational platform. It became the “big” thing to promote their brands and businesses.

Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella said in 2016 that Bots are the new apps.

A chat bot is a virtual user interface created to converse with the human at the other end. It is a program interface that gives a respective reply to your queries. It is an Artificial Intelligence that simulates and responds to the conversation. Chat bots are designed to offer a particular type of service or to answer a certain type of questions. Few chatbots that are mostly used are as follows.

Xiaolce

Microsoft’s huge chatbots success story is Xiaolce, the most trailblazing bot. She has even passed the Turing test, which means she could not be identified as a bot for the first ten minutes during conversations. This is actually a huge milestone to cross. The only drawback is her language barrier, as she was fluent only in Chinese. Despite she had over 0.5 billion conversations in a span of three months, since her launch.

Alexa

Amazon’s Alexa is the most victorious chatbots in recent times. She has reached more than 30 million homes. She can respond to your queries by means of voice tasks. She has more than 30k skills and she is most skilled compared to any other chat bot. She helps you in the shopping, to play your favorite song/radio, to answer queries or even engaging your kids to play karaoke.

Google Assistant

It can be enabled with a single swipe in our Android phones. It provides answers to queries, suggestions and even personalized content.

As Grand View research shows, 45% of end users prefer them as the important and primary mode of communication for regarding customer service questions.

Replika

It is a strange Artificial Intelligence chat bot, its main purpose is to be your friend. It converses with you about your family, personal feelings, friends, work, about your stress and even tells you a joke. It becomes a replica of you, more than a friend and you will not even feel that you are talking to a robot. It not only listens but learns from your texts.

Niki.ai

It is one app that enables you to do all the payment stuff including booking movie tickets, recharge, online payments, cabs, and hotels. Niki chat bot SDK (Software Development Kit) makes you chat and pay all the payments.

Insomnobot

This chat bot is your late night friend when you are unable to sleep at night. You can chat with Insomnobot only from 11 PM to 5 AM.You can ask anything it and you will get a reply to the questions asked by you.

Bots Vs Apps

Chat bot has failed to meet its expectation than they expected. So now they are making it to conversational platforms for complex cases in fields like banking and telecommunication. These platforms serve more than Natural language Understanding and Interface to cognitive and machine learning techniques. There is a debate all around the world, that bots might replace all the mobile applications to enable the business easier. Anything to be in access must be better, cheaper and faster. But you can clearly understand that bots are immature and they cannot be better and faster compared to apps. Because today’s apps are rich and let us access the difficult information systems.

Do chatbots fulfill our expectations?

Well, the answer to the question is actually contradictory. Some chatbots are not up to the mark. According to recent studies, about 70% of the 100,000+ chatbots are failing to satisfy users request on Facebook. They are not an all-rounder and only a specific task can be performed by the chat bot perfectly.

A bot that does one task great is better than a bot doing all the tasks poor.

Today’s chatbots are not listening and processing properly. The technology like Natural Language Processing (NLP) should make the chatbots to listen and understand the text properly. Some are doing that like Siri, but many others are still in their research labs. Even the Facebook M has failed to pass the Turing test and it got shut down. Many enterprises are aiming to create a bot that makes their business interactions sensible. That is where we should head to.

Computers are really great at computing like data searching, analyzing, manipulating and processing data. They are not good at understanding human emotions. This is the main drawback of usage of bots in enterprises, they are incapable of enabling sales, marketing and providing customer support.

Chat bots are still a toddler, they need to grow up.