Chatbot Popularity
There is a very fantastical experience shared by Robert Epstein who reported how he was duped by a chatterbot which appeared to him as a sexy girl in a personal ad. He didn’t guess anything beforehand and he answered on a dating website. In the ad, the highly attractive female introduced herself as a young lady residing in Southern California. At first he couldn’t understand that she was not a girl but a chatterbox. After couple of months, he came to know the reality and he felt shamed. Now in this sophisticated and glamorous tinsel world, the importance of the chatbot is gaining ground growing in popularity with the modern and most sophisticated facets of society. A chatterbot or chatbot is a sort of conversational agent which is a type of computer based program. This computer propelled program is designed to imitate the intelligent conversation with one or more human users through the media of auditory or textual methods.
Chatbots have had many titles attributed to them during their rise in popularity and all of which refer to the same thing, they may easily be called any of the following:
- talking bots
- talk bots
- chat bots
- chatterbox (or chatterbots)
- chat agents
- conversational agents
The the more popular chatterbot variety are those entirely hand written, they can converse after understanding the cue words or phrases from the human users through the usage of the pre-prepared or pre-calculated responses which can generate conversation giving prompt reply without understanding the meaning of the content. For instance if a person types something to the effect of ‘I felt scarred the previous night ‘ the chatterbox will ask the question ‘Why were you scared?’ after recognizing the phrase ‘I felt scared’. Again if a person types in ‘I am feeling very worried and frustrated of late.’ The chatter bot may ask the user ‘Why are you feeling so worried and frustrated of late?’ merely rephrasing the statement into a question much like the original Eliza would have done. However it is often but not always true that the chatterbox responds promptly without understanding the meaning of the content. There are some programs which can be categorized as the chatterbots through the usage of the principles. In more advanced scenarios, such as Jeeney’s design, the bot will analyze input from a wide range variables and averaged results to effectively learn over time and make a decision on how best to respond to the user.
There are some programs that prefer the proper utilization of the natural language conversation like SHRDLU which may or may not be perceived as chatterbots because of the interlink of their speech ability with the knowledge of an imitated world which needs a more intricate and complicated artificial mind such as vision system. However there is still the continuity of the vast research and study to upgrade the chatterbots. ELIZA and PARRY were utilized to imitate the typed conversation and simultaneously Racter was basically utilized for jotting down facts and story. On the other hand the ELLA contains a collection of games and functional features to increase the potentiality of chatterbots. Michael Mauldin the creator of the first Verbot, Julia in 1994 coined the term Chatterbot.
The fact remains that with the commercial expansion under the full glare of the liberal economy and the globalization, the internet based chatterbot is earning incredible popularity and fame among the younger generation. However, there are many wicked and malicious chatterbots which are frequently found in the chat rooms with spam and ads just to entice people into the revealing personal data such as bank account or credit card numbers. These malicious chatterbots are generally glittering in Yahoo Messenger, .NET Messenger Service, AOL Instant Messenger and others with the inclusion of third party instant messaging protocols. One can even go through a recent published report of a chatterbox which was found in a fake personals ad on a dating service’s website.
One of the most important fields in AI research is natural language. Generally, the weak AI fields apply the specialized software or programming languages such as A.I.M.L. designed by Dr. Richard S. Wallace to make it easier for people to designed pre-programmed responses for bots like A.L.I.C.E. In this connection, the Aussie company named MyCyberTwin also having rapport with strong AI permitting users to make their own virtual personality online. MyCyberTwin.com is also used widely in a corporate setting permitting the companies to establish Virtual AI Assistants. There are other programs both very popular and famous i.e. Jabberwacky which boast a strong AI implementation able to learn from human input. However these programs generally give some promise at first but most of the existing results in the matter of controlling the complicated problems of the natural language appear very substandard and poor. One of the best examples available on the net today for a strong AI implementation would be Jeeney AI, with only a fraction of the development time that most bots like Jabberwacky have had, she is rapidly passing all expectations.
More often than not, software developers like to focus on the practical side of the chatterbot mechanism which is more a type of information retrieval rather than a semantic intelligence.
Many people may view progress in artificial intelligence as very limited since the initial release of bots like Eliza but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Eliza was based on a very simple algorithm which merely transformed a persons input, adding or modifying a few words to redirect questions as output in attempt to keep a conversation flowing.