If you are a part of the digitised world, numerous times a small window must have opened asking you if you need any help, or “chat with us”. These are chatbots, (and not humans answering your questions) built to answer queries, requests, provide customer services, and inundate social media platforms with opinions, comments and fandom.
Smartphones now have access to a Siri or Cortana, and very likely your conversation at the end of line with a hospital ,cinema or any service related institutions are 99 percent of the time being handled by one such computer assisted voice. Experts opine that by 2020, 85 percent of customer interactions will be handled by chatbots and not humans.
Bots are the new apps, which are here to make our daily lives more ‘assisted’, easier and smoother. VentureBeat reports that in 2016 more than 30,000 branded chatbots were launched, and the number will keep on increasing going by the trend.
With advancements in Artificial Intelligence or AI, chatbots have advanced from their simple avatar of responding to specific commands and words to being capable of handling more complex queries. Chatbots use machine learning algorithms, deep learning and artificial intelligence to provide the best response by using language interface. Chatbots or simply bots, respond to users’ voices and use the interactions to improve, become more intuitive with constant engagement and progressively even anticipate and customise the answers to context.
Chatbots are not a new phenomenon, way back in 1960 the first chatbot Eliza was built by MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum. Eliza, was developed with only 200 lines of code, imitating the lexicon of a therapist. People conversing with ELIZA knew she was not human, but still developed emotional attachment to the chatbot. What came out from this early experiment was that humans have a desire to communicate with technology similar to how we communicate with each other. Technological advances in the last decade in AI have made it possible now for this desire to come true. But how far computers replace human interactions, is still open to debate.
Smartphones were the catalyst driving the wider use of chatbots. With interface becoming smaller and linear, researchers came up with diverse applications to fill this demand. Apps became the small change of the tech world. There was an app to solve any problems being thrown up. But surprisingly, the plethora of apps did not lead to wider adoption. A study from Comscore revealed that 78 percent of smartphone consumers use just three apps or less, and messaging apps are by far the most popular. This should not be surprising as research has proved that humans respond better to conversational interactions.
The advent of these natural language processing chatbots have brought in a new way of conducting business enabling retailers, service providers and brands to communicate with customers in a cost-effective way Chatbots bring down staff costs, are efficient workers with no bad days etc. And with social media platforms integrating them into promotional and personal services, consumers are finding them easy to use. They have recently gained immense popularity as virtual assistants to help navigate daily tasks in the form of Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, or products like Amazon’s Alexa or Google Home.
Chris Messina of Uber calls it “conversational commerce” and defines the explosion as :
…utilizing chat, messaging, or other natural language interfaces (i.e. voice) to interact with people, brands, or services and bots that heretofore have had no real place in the bidirectional, asynchronous messaging context. The net result is that you and I will be talking to brands and companies over Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, and elsewhere before year’s end, and will find it normal.
Recent examples of this explosion of AI-assisted chatbots include a professor at Georgia Tech building a chatbot teaching assistant, named Jill Watson. To plug loneliness and bring some emotional support there are Replika and Woebot, which provide behavioural therapy exercises, supportive texts and links. Ellie helps military doctors to detect post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and other mental illnesses in war veterans. There are AI chatbots that help in handling human resources with employee onboarding, in fintech and myriad other ways.
The opportunities in this field might be limitless but the fears of artificial intelligence taking over completely are very real. One major concern is that with chatbots on 24/7, huge data of our habits and interactions is being collected, analysed and interpreted. This leaves us open to many kinds of infringements and commercial and governmental exploitation.
There are concerns that we may build our biases into such bots. Tay, a bot created by Microsoft is a good example of this. Tay was let loose on Twitter and within 24 hours it started repeating all the racist chatter it was exposed to.
Over-dependence on chatbots for human interactions could lead to antisocial behavior. “We may want AI chatbots for the intimacy they promise not to ask for, for the challenges they won’t put to us,” Thomas Arnold, a researcher at the Human-Robot Interaction Laboratory at Tufts University, told Futurism. “At a certain point, we need to consider that we are just not that into each other.”
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