What is chatbot

A chatbot is a piece of software that conducts a conversation via auditory or textual methods Such programs are often designed to convincingly simulate how a human would behave as a conversational partner, although as of 2019, they are far short of being able to pass the Turing test Chatbots are typically used in dialog systems for various practical purposes including customer service or information acquisition. Some chatbots use sophisticated natural language processing systems, but many simpler ones scan for keywords within the input, then pull a reply with the most matching keywords, or the most similar wording pattern, from a database.
The term "ChatterBot" was originally coined by Michael Mauldin (creator of the first Verbot, Julia) in 1994 to describe these conversational programs. Today, most chatbots are accessed via virtual assistants such as Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, via messaging appssuch as Facebook Messenger or WeChat, or via individual organizations' apps and websites Chatbots can be classified into usage categories that include conversational commerce (e-commerce via chat), education, entertainment, finance, health, news, andproductivity.

Messaging apps
Many companies' chatbots run on messaging apps or simply via SMS. They are used for B2C customer service, sales and marketing


Chatbot in Use
A chatbot is an automated program that interacts with customers like a human would and cost little to nothing to engage with. Chatbots attend to customers at all times of the day and week and are not limited by time or a physical location. This makes its implementation appealing to a lot of businesses that may not have the manpower or financial resources to keep employees working around the clock.
conclusion
For many applications, the chatbot is connected to the database. The database is utilized to sustain the chatbot and provide appropriate responses to every user. NLP can translate human language into data information with a blend of text and patterns that can be useful to discover applicable responses.
There are NLP applications, programming interfaces, and services that are utilized to develop chatbots. And make it possible for all sort of businesses – small, medium or large-scale industries. The primary point here is that smart bots can help increase the customer base by enhancing the customer support services, thereby helping to increase sales.


HOW IS THE CHATBOT TRAINED?
Training a chatbot happens at much faster and larger scale than you teach a human. Humans Customer Service Representatives are given manuals and have them read it and understand. While the Customer Support Chatbot is fed with thousands of conversation logs and from those logs, the chatbot is able to understand what type of question requires what type of answers.

For example Sample Training set

class: greeting
“How you doing?”
“good morning”
“hi there”

Few sample Input sentence classification:

input: “Hello good morning”
term: “hello” (no matches)
Term: “good” (class: greeting)
term: “morning” (class: greeting)
classification: greeting (score=2)