Chatbots & AI Chatbots

My previous piece did mention AI agents and a brief introduction about chatbots. Let me help you understand what chatbots are and then move on to AI chatbots in this piece.

Chatbots are chat-powered support platforms initiated by product/service firms in order to support the prospects, customers, buyers, consumers, vendors etc. These are nothing but customer support tools where customers or anyone for that matter can enter statements and/or questions and the chatbots are programmed to deliver answers as per some information stored in them. Mostly, these are rule based, i.e., they answer based on a certain keyword or a set of keywords asked by a prospect. Also, they answer in a standard format answers which are preset to an almost fixed set of questions which can be asked to these chatbots. Thus, these are more of support based on a set of questions and a set of answers to them. These do follow a strict rulebook within which they respond to or reply to questions. They may also be classified as Traditional AI to a large extent.?

Now, coming to AI chatbots, these are conversational AI powered bots which are mostly equipped with Artificial Intelligence techniques such as NLP or Natural Language Processing. These chatbots are intelligent in nature and try to understand the user's questions and then offer responses accordingly. They learn not only from the questions but also from the answers they offer based on these user prompted questions. More on this “prompted questions” in another post.?

Ideally, these AI chatbots are advanced as compared to the Traditional chatbots or chatbots that use traditional AI per se. And, thus, these are called Advanced Chatbots or Advanced AI chatbots per se. The way to communicate with these chatbots is through questions and/or statements and these questions and/or statements are nothing but prompts. Like I mentioned I will come up with a detailed post on Prompts later on.

For now, you may want to use ChatGPT or Gemini which are examples of Advanced Chatbots powered by AI. Again, I neither work for ChatGPT or Gemini and I am not being incentivised to talk about them. But these are two popular Advanced AI chatbots which many AI enthusiasts use. Just a caveat though. Both of these offer responses based on data available publicly and thus, they may not give you the best specific responses at all times. You need to keep this in mind when using these.

Concluding, Chatbots and AI chatbots will become an integral part of communication by firms in the times to come. It remains to be seen though that by what time will these chatbots become more intelligent and self-learning so as to answer questions more specifically than more generally.