AI Chatbots: The Ultimate Guide for Beginners

Have you ever found yourself asking for help at a company’s customer care chat window at an odd hour and wondered whether the person you are talking with is a real person or not? For the most part, if you are talking to a company whose Headquarters is located in your region, then you are very likely chatting with a Robot, who has preprogrammed answers for every question that a customer asks. For a person who is not aware of AI, chatbots are very powerful pieces of technology that can be implemented in various fields, which helps reduce Human Intervention in various stages and automate human interactions This not only allows the company to perform certain tasks in a larger and even more efficient manner but it also poses certain benefits to its users. For instance, AI chatbots are very powerful in that they can be used to reach people faster and reduce wait time compared to human representatives. This flexible feature can be implemented by the company depending on its need and purpose. 

Chatbots: Are they really Humans?

Chatbots, as stated above, are just software and lines of code, that return output deemed appropriate from the user’s responses. However, the complexity of how the bot learns the proper responses to give is more complex: think of the bot like a small child who needs to be taught to speak. And like most of you, I’m sure you were not taught to speak English, you learned it as people around you were speaking it. Similarly, bots are fed incredibly large amounts of data to learn how to respond to all sorts of input. One problem that may arise is if the user inputs something that is incorrect or cannot be comprehended by the bot. In this case, a specific error message is programmed for these scenarios where the bot mentions that they are unable to help at this time and what the user can do to correct this problem. This is the general overview of the thought process that goes behind creating an online conversation robot. 

How are the Chatbots able to communicate? 

As we look into the chatbots that need to perform a wide variety of functions, we can observe that the robot might also have to understand what the user is trying to say. And so this task of taking an input from the user, understanding it, processing it, and giving a reply has a lot of steps that are involved. Below is a guide to the steps of how the chatbots function:

Input from the user

The very first step that deals with the conversation is the input that the Robot receives from the user. There are two popular, yet different ways that chatbots garner information. The domain that allows intelligent chatbots like Alexa or Siri to understand voice input is termed as ASR or Automatic Speech Recognition. This technology must be first trained in order to understand English by giving it sample speech data, and then the software should be integrated into the bot so that the information can be sent for further processes.

On the other hand, the technology that goes into understanding text is called NLP or Natural Language Processing. This particular technology does not need to be trained as extensively, but it just needs to be assigned certain special keywords to look for so that it can provide the user with a more seamless and natural conversation

Understanding the Input

After the specific Software has identified the input that was received by AI Chatbots, its next step is to understand what it says, so that it can carry out another function as a response. The software that is responsible for understanding the input is called Natural Language Understanding or NLU, the function of this software is to understand and identify certain action words so that it can trigger the next reactions.  is one of the most time-consuming processes in the whole conversation. This is since there are many factors AI chatbots must consider, including:

• Action Identification
• Ability to carry out the action
• Language error identification 
• Prompting the next actions

Processing this input

In this step, the program confirms that if there was no error that occurred during the understanding process, then it runs the particular action that was specified by the user. This process is the quickest because it only has to do with fulfilling the action. This is what is beyond creating a bridge between the user and the platform or the website the user is in.

The Final Step: Generating and sending a customized response. 

This is the final step that is involved in a Chatbot Conversation. The technology that is behind creating these responses is sometimes influenced by the language the person is using. Several factors are kept in mind while generating responses, including: 

• Intelligent quotient ( IQ  ) 
• Emotional quotient ( EQ ) 
• Human quotient ( HQ ) 

The Intelligent Quotient determines the amount of detail that the robot must include, and how to display the information that must be conveyed to the user. The Emotional quotient determines the use of grammar and sentence structuring in a way that the person feels that he is talking to another person, and provides support and faith. The human quotient serves the purpose to seamlessly integrate all of the necessary way to appeal to the human, such as adding humor. The chatbot is a very powerful implementation of AI, while making it seem like you are speaking to another Living Soul.