Desk Report: Chatbots are being taught to assist people in dealing with mental health issues such as anxiety and depression. The bots do not treat or diagnose – but human therapists have some reservations about the tech.
A chatbot (sometimes referred to as a chatterbot) is a computer program that attempts to simulate the conversation or “chatter” of a human being via text or voice interactions. A user can ask a chatbot a question or make a command, and the chatbot responds or performs the requested action.Chatbots can be thought of as the spokesperson for artificial intelligence (AI). It’s an accessible form of AI that is commonly put to use in businesses across sales and service departments and in the consumer app and device market.
Chatbots such as ELIZA and PARRY were early attempts at creating programs that could at least temporarily fool a real human being into thinking they were having a conversation with another person. PARRY’s effectiveness was benchmarked in the early 1970s using a version of a Turing test; testers only made the correct identification of human vs. chatbot at a level consistent with making a random guess.
Chatbots have come a long way since then. They are built on AI technologies, including deep learning, natural language processing and machine learning algorithms, and require massive amounts of data. The more an end user interacts with the bot, the better voice recognition becomes at predicting what the appropriate response is when communicating with an end user.
Chatbots can be stateless or stateful. A stateless chatbot approaches each interaction as if it was with a new user.
A stateful chatbot is more sophisticated; it can review past interactions and frame new responses in context.
Adding a chatbot to a company’s service or sales department today requires little coding, because there are a number of chatbot service providers that allow developers to build conversational interfaces for any business application.
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