Short Tutorial/FAQ – How Do Chatbots Work?

Question: Many of the websites I visit have chatbots, which pop up and ask me if I have questions or need help. How do chatbots work?

Answer: A chatbot is a computer program that's designed to simulate human conversation. Users communicate with these tools using a chat interface or via voice, just like they would talk with another person. Chatbots interpret the words given to them by a person and provide a pre-set answer.

How a chatbot works depends on which type of technology is being used. There are three common types of chatbots available today:

• Rule-based chatbots: These are the most straightforward option. They simply provide a pre-defined answer to very specific questions and are great for things like offering customers an interactive FAQ experience.
  
  
• Intelligent chatbots: This type of chatbot uses machine learning (ML) to learn from the user's requests and information. They're trained to understand specific words and phrases that trigger a reply, and they teach themselves over time to understand more questions and deliver better answers.
  
  
• AI-powered chatbots: Thanks to the addition of artificial intelligence (AI), these chatbots combine the benefits of rule-based bots with the power of intellectually independent programs to solve user problems. They can remember the context of conversations and understand user preferences, which helps to make the interactions between humans and computers feel more natural.

Training a chatbot occurs at a considerably faster and larger scale than human education. While customer service representatives are given a manual of instructions with which they must become familiar, a chatbot is nourished with a vast number of conversation logs, and from those logs, it can understand what type of question requires what kind of answers.