By Mr. Dipankar Ganguly, Co-founder and CTO, MeVero Inc
Trends in the Chatbot landscape and what the future holds
Nowadays in the digital-verse, Chatbots are ubiquitous. As digital platforms in various verticals like e-commerce, e-banking, e-learning etc. are constantly looking for deeper engagement with the customers, AI-powered Chatbots are emerging as the solution. Some of the trends that will reshape the BOT landscape are –
Integrating NLP (Natural Language Processing) with BOT Constructors will be made standard wherein creating NLP powered hyper-intelligent BOTS will be a standard commodity available to all.
Internal adoption of Chatbots by large enterprises for increasing productivity and standardized repeatable processes. As large enterprises look to increase efficiency across functions, Chatbots can accomplish repeatable tasks and also increase productivity of the human workforce.
Advanced voice integration with Chatbots will make customer experience and engagement richer and easier. As per Google, 27% of the online global population is using voice search on mobile. So, driving meaningful customer interaction through voice recognition Chatbots will become a standard practise.
Using NLP, AI and advanced voice recognition & generation, full spec automated call centers are no longer science fiction and will soon be a reality. With no down-time and 24/7 availability these will provide a deeper and always-on convenience for customers.
BOT to BOT Orchestration – BOTs will be designed for specific services and for achieving complex tasks multiple BOTs will be able to interact and utilize service capabilities to achieve complex tasks.
Payment systems will integrate chatbots and will help in automating payments via conversational interfaces.
Chatbots enabling learning
Chatbots are being used to create intelligent learning systems to provide a personalized learning environment to the student. They can help by becoming the personalised learning assistant for the students providing timely reminders, scheduling classes, answering queries, enabling student-to-student & student-to-teacher interactions. AI enabled Chatbots can also be used to teach the students by turning a lecture into a conversation to make it look like a chat. With the rise of online learning platforms, such Chatbots will be a standard feature in the near future.
Some of the Technologies used by the industry players
A lot of big players have started providing AI platforms which can be leveraged for building advanced chatbots. Some of these platforms are:
- Botkit
- Chatfuel
- Amazon Lex
- Microsoft Luis
- Google Dialogflow
- Rasa
- IBM Watson
Coupled with the knowledge of the above one should have strong programming skills in languages like Python, Node JS, Ruby. Experience with natural language processing services like Wit.ai, Dialogflow may be useful. Having a background in NLP programming and algorithms are a definite strong advantage.