“Did you just say that chatbots can understand emotions?”

While it is difficult for humans to understand other humans, technology seems to have conquered this human shortcoming. Chatbots, using deep learning, are the finest example of this.

Chatbots are not just fun to interact with but a great deal of help too. Chatbots assists us in accomplishing daily tasks like setting the alarm, calling someone, searching for a restaurant, and checking our bank statements, without us having to do anything much.

All of us today, prefer negligible human assistance for getting our work done. We’ve all come to realize that even for the most mundane and routine tasks, human assistance can involve substantial cost overheads. Instead, we now expect technologies to make our work easier. The advantage of technology over humans is twofold – greater accuracy and lesser cost. As technology gets older and more widely adopted, its price starts reducing. Take the example of smartphones here. The phones were initially quite expensive, but today, almost anyone can afford a smartphone.

15 percent of U.S. population states that they will not stop using chatbot no matter what. And that’s just the population in the U.S, and the percentage of users, for now, mind you. It’s not difficult to guess that the numbers can only be expected to rise, as chatbots get better, more sophisticated. In fact, AI experts are already working to make chatbots sensitive to emotions, using deep learning.

Using deep learning for ‘emotional’ chatbots

Gartner predicts, “25% of customer service operations will use chatbots by 2020.” With chatbots, the customer service agents can serve their customers appropriately. Chatbots seamlessly cut down the waiting time for customers. By tracking the mood of customers, chatbots can put in suitable offers for customers.

Gone are the days when we had to wait for hours to get our work done in banks. Now chatbots help us accomplish our numerous jobs, such as answering queries, in real time. One of the best benefits of chatbots is that it offers your customers round the clock support . With Emotional Intelligence, chatbots can perform almost every job an expert can, without getting tired. As businesses run because of customers, it is important to gauge the emotions of your customers to serve them better. Chatbots offer a personalized experience to consumers. Such an experience keeps customers happy.

Woebot, a friendly therapist, assimilates customer details to understand their mood. With such feature, Woebot can make them feel better. A China-based startup, Emotibot, develops chatbots that understand client's’ mood and accordingly respond to them. They aim to fill in the gap between the client and the company. They further add that their “chatbot has a 95.63% accuracy rate for detecting emotions based on visual indicators in China.” Besides, scientists have developed an Emotional Chatting Machine that responds to texts with a suitable emotion. They believe that its advanced features can bring suitable transformation to SIRI and Alexa.

The future of chatbots

To make the most out of chatbots, industries should implement conversational designers to uniquely craft the flow of interaction that chatbots have with humans. Designing a chatbot having a human-like personality, including empathy, will no doubt enhance customer interaction and experience. With deep learning and NLP, conversational designers can craft a chatbot that interacts exactly like humans.

Although we have seen various industries using chatbots to streamline their internal processes and enhance the customer experience, there are constant concerns regarding chatbots taking away human jobs. But the reality is chatbots help employees by performing the tedious and time-consuming jobs, thereby making way for employers to take up high-value jobs.

The increasing use of chatbots in various industries indicates its bright future. Using deep learning, scientists are developing chatbots that can better serve their customers. More advancements are on their way, and we might see almost all service via chatbots in the near future.