Shopping online? Not sure what to buy for someone? During the Christmas season, Nordstrom’s had an online chatbot that would help.
The chatbot asked a series of questions about who you were shopping for. It then chose gifts from Nordstrom’s online store that matched your answers. Requests for gift ideas were forwarded to a Nordstrom customer service representative who responded with customized gift ideas based on the request.
Website shopping isn’t the only area where chatbots are appearing. They are appearing on major chat platforms like Facebook Messenger, Slack, and Telegram.
- There is a weatherbot on Facebook messenger that looks like a cat named Poncho who will give you local weather forecasts.
- CNN has a newsbot that will discuss news you’re interested in.
- AT&T created Atticus who will chat with you about TV shows.
- How would you like a personal assistant to make appointments and keep you on Schedule?
- Chatterbot will chat with you on almost every subject. If it doesn’t have any info you may get a sarcastic or sassy answer. It’s never particularly serious and isn’t really personal.
- Virtual Talk will remember what you talk about and customize it’s conversations to you and your interests.
- There is even a life advice bot.
Chatbots magazine gives a very basic explanation of what a chatbot is: a service, powered by rules and sometimes artificial intelligence, that you interact with via a chat interface. Toptal has a very detailed explanation about (ML) machine learning, which is the backbone of (AI) artificial intelligence.
Thenextweb.com calls 2017 the year of the chatbot, quoting Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella “bots are the new apps.” Not only are large companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft developing chatbots, but they are encouraging small businesses to develop their own.
- Facebook offers wit.ai to build a chatbot for Facebook messenger.
- Microsoft has Bot Framework to chat from your website or app to text/SMS, Skype, Slack, Facebook Messenger, Office 365 mail, Teams and other popular services.
- Howdy Botkit is an open-source toolkit for creating bots for messaging platforms.
Gartner predicts that in 2017 only one-third of customer service interactions will include a live person and more people are using messaging apps than social media. If a company, small or large wants to reach customers, messaging apps are the place to be seen, and chatbots are the way to be seen.
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