Why using a chat bot ?

Chat bot / chatter bot has been around for a long time. The first computer program acts like a chatbot can be dated back to 1967. SciFi Movies made from last century with computers often features scene like type in a question and the computer respond with some direct answer, acting like a chat bot.

In the recent years, with the huge success of search engines, people are more used to type in some keywords and start searching, navigating through result page, instead of just asking a direct question and expecting answer. This works fine for a lot of occasions, especially when you have some good keywords combination to search. However, if you only have some general words, expecting getting hundreds of pages of totally unintended results. The latest "Bing" commercial certainly mads a joke about that.

The key here is context. Search engines don't have context to rely on. They act on keywords. Some search engine try to be smart and using searching statistics to be "context", and use that information to rank the search result. However, this degree of context is nowhere close to the contextual understanding of an intellectual conversation, even it is just a simple question and answer session.

For example, when you are asking a shopping assistant for "how much is shipping?" The implied context includes your address and your current in cart items. Based on information, a shopping assistant can give you a direct answer. However, if you type those words in a search engine, the best thing it can do is pointing you to the shipping calculation page. And most of times, it will also give you links to shipping policy, result related with word "much", "how", even ship models.



In many occasions, people just want simple straight answers for simple question instead of doing a search. Many websites make FAQ pages to cover those simple questions. Unfortunately, not many people have the patience of reading those pages.

Chat bots can solve this problem very well. It can provide simple, straight answer to simple questions. Statics has shown most of the customer questions answered by customer support are very simple, straight answer questions. This is probably why chat bot has gain some popularity recently. Paypal, IKEA, HP all have customer support chat bots on their webpage. www.chatbots.org has a list of over 500 chatbots in public domain.