How a Chatbot Works: The Company’s 24/7 Voice

We have all interacted with digital devices, most commonly those small windows that appear on websites offering assistance. Increasingly, we have all spoken with chatbots.

What is a Chatbot?

Chatbots are software developed with artificial intelligence that allow conversations with digital devices, simulating human interaction. These computer programs enable us to interact, in real-time, with text and voice assistants that answer our questions or help us with specific processes.

We can see text-based chatbots on many websites in the form of a pop-up window offering assistance to resolve queries. They vary in complexity, and in many cases, they feature a person’s image, even a name, to give the system a friendly and human appearance. Anna from IKEA was very well-known for the novelty of its implementation; many of us went to get acquainted with it, and many more to test its patience with comments unrelated to the Swedish multinational’s products. While this format, the pop-up window on a website, is the most common, they have also been enabled on social networks like Facebook Messenger or Telegram.

Meanwhile, virtual voice assistants, increasingly popular and widespread, are bots that aim to respond to our needs through spoken, conversational interaction. The most famous, and highly demanded in recent times, are Alexa, Siri, or Cortana, which we ask for everything from weather information, road conditions, the biography of a famous person, or the most popular song on the current charts.

How does a chatbot work?

Dialogue between people and machines is complex; we use different languages that must be converted for both parties to understand each other. The operation of bots is based on Artificial Intelligence systems and their derived technology, which, as the name suggests, makes it possible to equip machines with human abilities, in this case, language and learning. To achieve this, the following come into play:

• Natural Language Processing (NLP): divides communications into parts (phrases and words) and identifies each of the relevant elements that make up the message, so that computers understand conversations and can return an appropriate response. It considers user emotions and detects and corrects spelling errors to ensure comprehension.
• Natural Language Understanding (NLU): Once decoded, language must be understood by machines, and this is where Natural Language Understanding (NLU) comes into play. Through machine learning classification algorithms, the user’s intent is estimated. This part of NLP consequently works with syntax and semantics to decipher the message and the sender’s objective in transmitting it. To achieve this, it also uses resources learned from previous conversations.
• Natural Language Generation (NLG): The time comes to return a response to the user, an action enabled by Natural Language Generation (NLG). Chatbots with this technology determine the exact response to offer based on the question or comment received and the context of the ongoing conversation. This requires training the predictive model to address the causality of human comments, which are often ambiguous.

Chatbot Types

Chatbots have different levels of complexity depending on their utility and mission, ranging from short, standardized responses to personalized and highly adapted conversations based on the specific dialogue being held, a result of machine learning. All are based on artificial intelligence, which they complement with derived technology to facilitate certain services, and they base their activity on the recognition of human language, whether by text or voice.

The less complex ones, those aimed at resolving simple queries, rely on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and basic Machine Learning to recognize user requests and return a response to those interactions. In these cases, the conversation is based on the most common questions asked about the product or service they are oriented towards; that is, the bots provide users with very specific automated responses based on the keywords noted. In this way, we can find contact phone numbers, general order delivery times, shipping methods, basic product information, opening hours, etc.

Virtual assistants are much more advanced systems that, thanks to Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Natural Language Generation (NLG), and Machine Learning, manage to interpret the context of the conversation and learn from each dialogue to offer elaborate responses tailored to each user.

With these assistants, interactions are more realistic because they are personalized based on previous behaviors; they can even offer suggestions and anticipate user needs with predictive analytics, which leads to a better user experience. As we have already mentioned, the prime examples of these assistance bots are Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Microsoft’s Cortana, although this technology is also used by text-based chatbots.

Benefits of Chatbots

• Improved customer service.
• Permanent and immediate assistance (24/7).
• Simple implementation.
• Cost-effective resource.
• Screens contacts for the sales team.
• Collects contact data from users more willing to provide it during interaction with the bot.
• Enhances brand image.