Chatbots Can Benefit Your Marketing Strategy

A chatbot (also known as a talkbot, chatterbot, Bot, chatterbox, Artificial Conversational Entity) is a computer program which conducts a conversation via auditory or textual methods. Such programs are often designed to convincingly simulate how a human would behave as a conversational partner, thereby passing the Turing test. 


Chatterbots are typically used in dialog systems for various practical purposes including customer service or information acquisition. Some chatterbots use sophisticated natural language processing systems, but many simpler systems scan for keywords within the input, then pull a reply with the most matching keywords, or the most similar wording pattern, from a database.

Chatbots have been in use a long time, albeit in different forms. The automated customer-service robots that help navigate you through those seemingly endless phone trees when you call an 800 number were an early form of chatbots.

Today, chatbots are much more sophisticated and make use of some pretty high-level artificial intelligence (AI). The AI, in fact, is so good that many chatbots are indistinguishable from actual humans conversing.

While chatbots have been around for a while, they recently blew up in popularity when Facebook allowed branded chatbots onto its Facebook Messenger app.

Branded or service chatbots are only one type of chatbot that exists today. The other type is informational chatbots. Well-known informational chatbots include Siri, Cortana and Amazon’s Echo. These types of bots are not built to serve any marketing function, but exist as a tool to help people with a wide array of varying needs.

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