The Virtual Conversations _Chatbot

Chit-chats, Quick Confabs, the Nattered away hours or the Skull sessions to the Merely empty Gabfests .. all such communications lead the way to a Conversation which builds a basic root to Socializing .. Don’t you agree ?

Socializing is a key to develop any organization, company, Institution or any start-up in a wide-way connecting people around and maintaining healthy relationships with the co-employees by regularly monitoring their views, feedbacks, comments and suggestions. This is where the technology played its role to evolve such conversations through the virtual assistants popularly named as “Chatbots”.

Chatbot ?

What is the role of it ?

.. and are they only used for business and official purposes ??

A "Chatbot" is often described as one of the most advanced and promising expressions of interaction between humans and machines. However, from a technological point of view, a chatbot only represents the natural evolution of a Question Answering system leveraging Natural Language Processing (NLP). A chatbot is basically an artificial intelligence (AI) software that can simulate a conversation (or a chat) with a user in natural language through messaging applications, websites, mobile apps or through the voice or text.

As you can see in this graphic, a chatbot returns a response based on input from a user. This process may look simple; in practice, things are quite complex.

Chatbot have benefitted different Industries with their own use-cases set : (Roles) -

Chatbots are used in different sectors like in Retail And Consumer Goods, Banking , Insurance , Education ,Healthcare, Manufacturing , Hospitality, Airline , Oil and Gas . . . etc ! ..

When chatbots took off, businesses became super excited. They started to apply them to be in line with the newest trends. But that has changed. Bots are no longer a cool innovation; they are a must that lets brands meet changing users’ expectations.

. . are the chatbots useful for other than offiicial or business purposes ??

In response to the array of mostly avoided one of the topics "mental disorders" that includes depression, bipolar affective disorder, schizophrenia and other psychoses, dementia, intellectual disabilities and developmental disorders including autism for which such conditions manifest in different ways such as abnormal thoughts, perceptions, emotions, behavior, and relationships with others , the technology companies have took a social responsibilty and gave a keen thought to develop artificial intelligence applications for mobile phones that aim to be the first line of support for mental health patients, yet provide privacy and anonymity.

AI applications targeted at alleviating mental health disorders through conversing virtually with the people who face such crucial issues with the help of chatbots which tries to understand the patient's emotions and mind-state through the inputs they provide(voice and text) and respond accordingly to help them . Few developed bots for such therapeutic conversations are Woebot , Moodkit , Moodnotes, Wysa .. etc ..

An Overview of a Chatbot ..

Communication has been the essence of life from the beginning of times. With the evolution of technology, mode and style of communication have also evolved . This is not an end of the innovation of existing chatbots . As the cycle of technology changes, the features and facilities of such virtual conversational agents will also keep evolving up to the date ..

- S. Jaya Darshana

- Intern - CoE-AI Lab