Chatbots: A story of evolution

Chatbots: A story of evolution

Chatbots is a history of the evolution of coding, technology, and the world around us. What is fascinating about it is that it is something that has come to fruition with incredible speed.

What are chatbots?

There is a very wide definition on chatbots but IBM defines them as a computer program that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) combined with natural language processing (NLP), which allows it to understand customer questions and then using the underlying program to provide answers to these questions, thus simulating a human conversation.[1]

History of chatbots

Chatbots were first suggested as an idea by Alan Turing in 1950, where he speculated that by the year 2000 a program would be able to similar a human in an interrogation and fool the human 70% of the time.

• ELIZA was the first chatbot developed by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT in 1966. It tried to mimic human speech to return a statement into a question, primarily simulating a conversation with a psychotherapist.
• PARRY – another type of chatbot developed by Kenneth Colby from the University of Stanford in 1972. It was built to simulate a patient with schizophrenia.
• ALICE (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) - created by Richard Wallace in 1995. Based on pattern matching, which was made possible by having a knowledge base of 41,000 templates and patterns.
• Jabberwacky was another program developed from the 1980s by Rollo Carpenter.
• SmarterChild emerged in 2001 and was integrated into AOL and MSN
• Siri was Apple’s version of a chatbot released in 2010, that changed how people used their mobile devices.
• Most recently, Watson, the brainchild of IBM was able to mimic and understand the human language so well that it won against two previous champions.
• Cortana released in 2014 was a Microsoft version of the chatbot.
• Amazon also released their version called Alexa, which integrated with their smart home devices (Echo)

Uses for chatbots

Chatbots can have multiple functions.

They can increase productivity as they can operate 24/7 by asking a complex multitude of client enquiries from booking management, reservations, cancellations. Also, the added benefit is that chatbots cannot resign like regular customer service agents. In addition, they can be reached on a multitude of devices – phones, tablets, computers, and others.

Emergency services have been keen to adopt the technology as chatbots can be very useful in situations where the user might not be able to call or even speak over the phone, thus compromising their location. Some of these chatbots record the users’ name, location and then transfer that information to emergency services.

Banks have been another major adopters of the technology, as it has helped them to cut operating costs.  Estimates are that banks could save billions of dollars’ worth of operating costs, where most of daily calls and queries can be dealt with a chatbot.

Airlines have also become adopters of chatbots, especially during the COVID pandemic, when they had to deal with an unprecedented number of cancellations, flight changes, and all other kinds of turmoil that devastated the travel industry. Lower customer staff levels meant that airlines had to reach and adopt the technology at a faster pace in order to deal with customer queries and requests.

The caveat for all these implementations is that people still need to speak to a human for more complicated tasks currently that are not easily dealt with the pre-defined protocols of the chatbots. Also, a chatbot like any software is as good as the underlying code, functionality, and structure behind. Without robust controls these can easily be exploited and cause more harm than good.

Future of chatbots

Chatbots are here to stay, and their usage will become even more pronounced. This could bring further automation to several roles that previously relied on customer interactions, communication, as well as empathy. This technology is evolving rapidly and could definitely bring a host of benefits to how organizations think, structure, and deploy their customer facing infrastructure. Still like any new tool, the chatbot is not without downsides but we will have to see how it will evolve in the coming years.