Introduction
Today, new tools are being designed to simplify and reduce the interaction between humans and computers. It becomes essential for businesses to solve queries and problems of customers thereby ensuring customer loyalty and brand establishment. One such technological advancement which is taking the world by storm and causing a positive revolution is the Chatbot. With the evolution of artificial intelligence now in full swing, chatbots are just a faint splash on a massive wave of progress.
Chatbot Developer
A chatbot developer is one who develops chatbots which are computer programs which can have real conversations using a chat interface. He is one who has a deep understanding of software development, chatbot platforms, AI, and machine learning, to name a few. His work would involve collaborating with cross-functional teams to define, construct, and ship new chatbots, developing software to analyze customer needs and design, managing production support issues, developing chatbots and other AI-based support systems, and providing technical expertise to analyze various aspects of the organization such as software, hardware, and IT infrastructure.
Having understood who a chatbot developer is, let us now analyze the questions and answers asked in interview sessions conducted to hire chatbot developers.
1. What is a chatbot?
A chatbot is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) software used to stimulate conversations with users in a natural language through telephones, websites, messages, and mobile apps. A chatbot responds based on the input from a user. These are smart robots which answer questions. They receive the questions, process them by understanding the question, and then deliver the answer that the user needs.
2. How does the chatbot understand what the customer is trying to convey?
The chatbot is trained with actual chat data. Companies which already make use of human-powered chat have logs of the previous conversations. These logs are used to analyze what people are asking and what they intend to convey. With a combination of machine learning models and an ensemble of tools, the user’s questions are matched with their intents. Models are trained in such a way that the bot is able to connect similar questions to a correct intent and produce the correct answer.
3. How do we teach the bot?
It is taught in the same way as humans are taught but at a larger scale and in a much faster manner. To teach a human customer service representative, we provide them with manuals which they read and understand and apply in a practical setting while performing the work. In the case of chatbots, thousands of conversation logs are shown to it and from that, it understands the nature of questions and the types of answers it needs to provide.
4. How does the bot know when it needs to converse with a human?
At the end of each conversation with a chatbot, the question, ‘Did we help you?’ is asked and if we answer ‘No,’ the conversation is forwarded to human support. The same way when a chatbot is unable to understand a question provided by a human, it will forward the conversation by itself to human customer support.
5. How does the bot continue to learn once it’s life and how do we make sure it doesn’t start behaving or speaking in an inappropriate manner?
Once the bot is set-up and starts interacting with customers, smart feedback loops are implemented. When customers ask questions, chatbots give them certain options in order to understand their questions and needs more clearly. This information is used to retrain the model thereby ensuring the accuracy of the chatbot. There are also guarding systems which have been implemented to make sure that the bot doesn’t change based on a few replies. This is also ensured by making sure that the bot simply just doesn’t rephrase what people tell it but is actually taught to answer questions the way its owner (the company) wants it to answer.
6. Can the bot be controlled once it is live?
Yes, absolutely. The chatbot has been programmed to understand specific questions. The developing company can decide the extent to which it wants to expand or shrink its understanding.
7. What are the key benefits of chatbots to business applications?
It saves time and money and improves customer experience. It helps get feedback from actual users in real-time. Chatbots get smarter with time. They reduce the need for human intervention as the User Interface (UI) is generated automatically in many cases. For businesses with powerful front-end tooling, it can help in setting up cognitive chatbots in all your channels.
8. What languages and technologies should a chatbot developer be well-versed in to build chatbots?
One needs to have a fair knowledge of back-end technologies and analytics. Languages used for developing chatbots are Java, C#, Python, and Node JS. To be able to answer arbitrary questions and to develop these smart robots, a deep understanding of machine learning, artificial intelligence, Natural Language Understanding (NLU), and Google Cloud Natural Language API (Application Programming Interface) is required.
9. Will chatbots replace mobile apps in the future?
AI-powered bots working with voice and text may become a common feature and an everyday activity of humans. It will become as regular as 3G internet and 3D printing are in today’s scenario. In the close future, chatbots will become more human-like that it will be possible to ask a bot to make something for you which the bot will carry out if it is possible. They will become more like personal assistants to carry out our routine tasks such as buying groceries, paying bills, searching for holiday destinations, and much more.
10. What are some of the most popular companies using chatbots?
Some renowned financial leaders and top brands in the IT industry use chatbots for customer support and automation of business processes. CNN, Wall Street Journal, Microsoft, NASA, Hubspot, and Skyscanner are some of the prominent companies on this list. According to UK-based firm, Juniper Research, chatbots can help businesses save $8 billion annually worldwide by 2022.
Conclusion
A chatbot is referred to as one of the most promising expressions of interaction between machines and humans. Chatbot applications help streamline interactions between people and services. It offers new opportunities for companies to improve operational efficiency and customer engagement process. This helps bring down the cost of customer services. An effective and efficient chatbot solution is one that can perform both these tasks. Human intervention is necessary to configure, train, and optimize the chatbot. To understand the perfect chatbot application that would be suitable for a specific purpose, one needs to use a combination of different AI forms such as semantic understanding, machine learning, and natural language processing.