The Main Technologies behind Chatbots

Recently I had the chance to work with those technologies in a deeper way and I’ve noticed that one of the questions someone who wants to start a chatbot project usually asks is: how to predict the way users’ will communicate with the system. Every single user is a new user and doesn’t always start a conversation with “hi” or “hello” and won’t end a conversation with “bye” or “thank you” every time. The user can simply say “see you later” or he can even be more relaxed and say “bye bro”. So how can we deal with this challenge of predicting the human behavior assertively?

There are technologies nowadays that give chatbots the capability to learn new communication patterns according to their use. This kind of “self-upgrade” is called Machine-Learning, and the act of communicate adapting to a user’s behavior is called Natural Language. That is basically the language that humans are used to.

Real cases

I’ve been involved in some of the projects developed by Programmers and I’ve had the opportunity to experience a number of similar situations, such as:

On one of the projects we needed to “generate an access token to the internal network”, but we couldn’t force the users to use terms like “Token Wi-Fi” or “Wi-Fi Password” or “Access to Wi-Fi”.

To solve this kind of problem we adopted a machine-learning based solution, because this way it’s not necessary to think about all the possible interactions but only with the most common ones.

Another chatbot project had the objective of identify possible diseases based on the users described symptoms. For example: “I’m feeling a stomach ache” or “my belly hurts”. On many of these cases these users wanted to express the same symptom but with different words.

The chatbot starts to recognize new communication patterns to express specific intentions and with time and training it will be able to consider “bye bro” as a way of saying goodbye and recognize “Wi-Fi password” and “token wi-fi” as meaning exactly the same thing for the user.

Surely a market trend

Today chatbots already exist capable of voice communication, integrating themselves to Cortana, as an example of e multi language chatbot. The great advantage of a chatbot that communicates over an IVR is its capability of changing the context of the conversation and adapt itself to the user, making the experience more natural.

And is that practicality on the user X system interaction and his versatility that turns chatbots so popular and a trend on the technology market.

A lot of enterprises are betting on this kind of technology to attend faster and more efficiently their demands on diverse layers of their business.

So, prepare yourself. The chatbots are coming, stronger, smarter and more efficient to empower businesses, customers and users alike!

Chatbots and Application Modernization

Chatbots are one of the ways companies can modernize their legacy applications using automation. Many customers have gotten used to leveraging chatbots to find the information they need. The same holds true for employees, particularly while navigating HR systems or familiarizing themselves with enterprise platforms.

That means chatbots streamline information queries and onboarding, and users are also very comfortable working with them. For these reasons, implementing chatbots is a good idea for many companies looking to modernize their systems. Learn more about how our Fast-Track Application Modernization service brings value to organizations like yours every 90 days. You can also see an example of how adding automated systems during modernization brought value to one company.