Chatbots are becoming increasingly popular in a variety of industries. Chatbots are being developed for a variety of services, including hotel, travel, and movie bookings, customer service, bus and train schedule inquiries, tax-saving advice, stock market information, and so on. But why are they attracting such a large amount of attention? The reason is simple: they assist in reducing the amount of time, effort, and money required to complete a task (and if designed well, they also improve the user experience).
Virtual assistants such as Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa, Cortana, and others have been giving a variety of solutions to customers in recent years, including not only textual but also interactive solutions through its’speech-based search engine.’ These generic chatbots have improved their conversational experience dramatically, becoming more smart, responsive, and ‘natural.’
Chatbots can also be found in a variety of domain-specific jobs, such as customer service, flight/room booking, tax-saving advice, and so on. So, rather than having a person assist a user, we can now just deploy a chatbot that can read and recognise what the user said or intended, and then determine a sequence of acceptable responses based on that information.
A chatbot can also answer questions on a specific domain or type of task. A ‘weather bot,’ for example, can simply predict the weather. It is unable to reserve a seat at a restaurant or set an alarm. A restaurant discovery bot, for example, can only assist you identify eateries in a few cities; it may not be able to answer general inquiries like “Who is India’s Prime Minister?”