Chatbots have been around since the late sixties.
The first chatbot, Eliza, was rudimentary but it proved the potential of chatbots even
back then.
So why are chatbots suddenly so in demand now, half a century later?
Two key developments have allowed chatbots to become such a hot topic.
The first one is the emergence of messenger applications.
Whatsapp, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, and even Slack have become incredibly popular.
Collectively, they are used by billions of people around the world.
That’s “B”, not “M”.
Facebook Messenger alone currently has over 1.2 Billion active monthly users.
In fact, messenger platforms are more popular than even social media sites.
A key tenet of good business is to go where your customers are.
If so many people’s preferred method of communication is through messenger's apps, being
able to tap into that audience becomes a very appealing proposition for most businesses.
Especially when your chatbot becomes one of the many conversations your customer is having
with their friends.
In practice, almost turning your brand into yet another friend in their list.
Hiring people to chat with your customers on such platforms is expensive and can only
scale so much.
Chatbots provide an affordable and scalable solution.
The second key component that allowed chatbots to really take off, is the emergence of Cognitive
Computing.
Because this technology isn’t of much use if your chatbot gets to talk to people but
is unable to understand what the user wants and respond accordingly.
Over the past few years, machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing,
and artificial intelligence in general, have all progressed quite rapidly.
What’s more, AI is no longer accessible solely to researchers with PhDs in Computer
Science.
Such cognitive capabilities are now easily available via libraries like TensorFlow and
through services provided by companies like IBM.
You might be familiar with IBM Watson who, several years ago, defeated the best Jeopardy
players in the world.
Today, the many cognitive computing abilities of Watson are readily provided as services
and APIs that are available to anyone with a Bluemix account.
In this course, we’ll actually use one such service.
Specifically, I’m talking about Watson Conversation.
This will enable us to develop a chatbot that understands our users’ input without having
to write any code in order to handle the NLP or natural language processing part of our
chatbot.
In the section below, I provided a link to Bluemix.
If you want to get a head start, you can register for a free account now.
If you’d prefer to wait, I’ll provide the link again when we start building the
chatbot later on in this course.
Messenger apps might have been the catalyst for the emergence of chatbots, but they are
certainly not the only platform.
Chatbots are now appearing on sites and as mobile apps as well.
It’s not so much the platform on which they are delivered on, but rather the conversational
nature of the interface.
Many in the tech world consider chatbots to be a revolutionary way of interacting with
software, and it is bound to become an ever more popular way of delivering software and
services.
At one point web interfaces were revolutionary and they managed to change the world of software.
Then came the era of mobile interfaces.
Now it’s time for conversational or chat interfaces to shine.
In this course, we’ll build our chatbot and deploy it on a WordPress site using a
convenient plugin that my team has developed.
This will allow us to deploy our chatbot in a “chat with us” popup in the bottom right
corner of any WordPress-powered site.