^{Telegram launched its bot API in 2015, and launched version 2.0 of its platform in April 2016, adding support for bots to send rich media and access geolocation services. As with Kik, Telegram’s bots feel spartan and lack compelling features at this point, but that could change over time. Telegram has also yet to add payment features, so there are not yet any shopping-related bots on the platform.}
Reports of political interferences in recent elections, including the 2016 US and 2017 UK general elections,[3] have set the notion of botting being more prevalent because of the ethics that is challenged between the bot’s design and the bot’s designer. According to Emilio Ferrara, a computer scientist from the University of Southern California reporting on Communications of the ACM,[4] the lack of resources available to implement fact-checking and information verification results in the large volumes of false reports and claims made on these bots in social media platforms. In the case of Twitter, most of these bots are programmed with searching filter capabilities that target key words and phrases that reflect in favor and against political agendas and retweet them. While the attention of bots is programmed to spread unverified information throughout the social media platform,[5] it is a challenge that programmers face in the wake of a hostile political climate. Binary functions are designated to the programs and using an Application Program interface embedded in the social media website executes the functions tasked. The Bot Effect is what Ferrera reports as when the socialization of bots and human users creates a vulnerability to the leaking of personal information and polarizing influences outside the ethics of the bot’s code. According to Guillory Kramer in his study, he observes the behavior of emotionally volatile users and the impact the bots have on the users, altering the perception of reality.
In our work at ZipfWorks building and scaling intelligent shopping platforms and applications, we pay close attention to emerging trends impacting digital commerce such as chatbots and mobile commerce. As this nascent trend towards a more conversational commerce ecosystem unfolds at a dizzying pace, we felt it would be useful to take a step back and look at the major initiatives and forces shaping this trend and compiled them here in this report. We’ve applied some of these concepts in our current project Dealspotr, to help more shoppers save more money through intelligent use of technology and social product design.
To be more specific, understand why the client wants to build a chatbot and what the customer wants their chatbot to do. Finding answers to this query will guide the designer to create conversations aimed at meeting end goals. When the designer knows why the chatbot is being built, they are better placed to design the conversation with the chatbot.
If the success of WeChat in China is any sign, these utility bots are the future. Without ever leaving the messaging app, users can hail a taxi, video chat a friend, order food at a restaurant, and book their next vacation. In fact, WeChat has become so ingrained in society that a business would be considered obsolete without an integration. People who divide their time between China and the West complain that leaving this world behind is akin to stepping back in time.
_{WeChat was created by Chinese holding company Tencent three years ago. The product was created by a special projects team within Tencent (who also owns the dominant desktop messaging software in China, QQ) under the mandate of creating a completely new mobile-first messaging experience for the Chinese market. In three short years, WeChat has exploded in popularity and has become the dominant mobile messaging platform in China, with approximately 700M monthly active users (MAUs).}

Pop-culture references to Skynet and a forthcoming “war against the machines” are perhaps a little too common in articles about AI (including this one and Larry’s post about Google’s RankBrain tech), but they do raise somewhat uncomfortable questions about the unexpected side of developing increasingly sophisticated AI constructs – including seemingly harmless chatbots.

Die Herausforderung bei der Programmierung eines Chatbots liegt in der sinnvollen Zusammenstellung der Erkennungen. Präzise Erkennungen für spezielle Fragen werden dabei ergänzt durch globale Erkennungen, die sich nur auf ein Wort beziehen und als Fallback dienen können (der Bot erkennt grob das Thema, aber nicht die genaue Frage). Manche Chatbot-Programme unterstützen die Entwicklung dabei über Priorisierungsränge, die einzelnen Antworten zuzuordnen sind. Zur Programmierung eines Chatbots werden meist Entwicklungsumgebungen verwendet, die es erlauben, Fragen zu kategorisieren, Antworten zu priorisieren und Erkennungen zu verwalten[5][6]. Dabei lassen manche auch die Gestaltung eines Gesprächskontexts zu, der auf Erkennungen und möglichen Folgeerkennungen basiert („Möchten Sie mehr darüber erfahren?“). Ist die Wissensbasis aufgebaut, wird der Bot in möglichst vielen Trainingsgesprächen mit Nutzern der Zielgruppe optimiert[7]. Fehlerhafte Erkennungen, Erkennungslücken und fehlende Antworten lassen sich so erkennen[8]. Meist bietet die Entwicklungsumgebung Analysewerkzeuge, um die Gesprächsprotokolle effizient auswerten zu können[9]. Ein guter Chatbot erreicht auf diese Weise eine mittlere Erkennungsrate von mehr als 70 % der Fragen. Er wird damit von den meisten Nutzern als unterhaltsamer Gegenpart akzeptiert.

In this article, we shed a spotlight on 7 real-world chatbots/virtual assistants across industries that are in action and reaping value for their parent companies. From streamlined operations and saved human productivity to increased customer engagement, the following examples are worth a read if you’ve ever considered leveraging chatbot technology for your business (or are curious about the possibilities).

We need to know the specific intents in the request (we will call them as entities), for eg — the answers to the questions like when?, where?, how many? etc., that correspond to extracting the information from the user request about datetime, location, number respectively. Here datetime, location, number are the entities. Quoting the above weather example, the entities can be ‘datetime’ (user provided information) and location(note — location need not be an explicit input provided by the user and will be determined from the user location as default, if nothing is specified).
^{Chatbots have come a long way since then. They are built on AI technologies, including deep learning, natural language processing and  machine learning algorithms, and require massive amounts of data. The more an end user interacts with the bot, the better voice recognition becomes at predicting what the appropriate response is when communicating with an end user.}
Ursprünglich rein textbasiert, haben sich Chatbots durch immer stärker werdende Spracherkennung und Sprachsynthese weiterentwickelt und bieten neben reinen Textdialogen auch vollständig gesprochene Dialoge oder einen Mix aus beidem an. Zusätzlich können auch weitere Medien genutzt werden, beispielsweise Bilder und Videos. Gerade mit der starken Nutzung von mobilen Endgeräten (Smartphones, Wearables) wird diese Möglichkeit der Nutzung von Chatbots weiter zunehmen (Stand: Nov. 2016).[10] Mit fortschreitender Verbesserung sind Chatbots dabei nicht nur auf wenige eingegrenzte Themenbereiche (Wettervorhersage, Nachrichten usw.) begrenzt, sondern ermöglichen erweiterte Dialoge und Dienstleistungen für den Nutzer. Diese entwickeln sich so zu Intelligenten Persönlichen Assistenten.
Bots are also used to buy up good seats for concerts, particularly by ticket brokers who resell the tickets.[12] Bots are employed against entertainment event-ticketing sites. The bots are used by ticket brokers to unfairly obtain the best seats for themselves while depriving the general public of also having a chance to obtain the good seats. The bot runs through the purchase process and obtains better seats by pulling as many seats back as it can.
Think about the possibilities: all developers regardless of expertise in data science able to build conversational AI that can enrich and expand the reach of applications to audiences across a myriad of conversational channels. The app will be able to understand natural language, reason about content and take intelligent actions. Bringing intelligent agents to developers and organizations that do not have expertise in data science is disruptive to the way humans interact with computers in their daily life and the way enterprises run their businesses with their customers and employees.
“Major shifts on large platforms should be seen as an opportunities for distribution. That said, we need to be careful not to judge the very early prototypes too harshly as the platforms are far from complete. I believe Facebook’s recent launch is the beginning of a new application platform for micro application experiences. The fundamental idea is that customers will interact with just enough UI, whether conversational and/or widgets, to be delighted by a service/brand with immediate access to a rich profile and without the complexities of installing a native app, all fueled by mature advertising products. It’s potentially a massive opportunity.” — Aaron Batalion, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners
ELIZA's key method of operation (copied by chatbot designers ever since) involves the recognition of clue words or phrases in the input, and the output of corresponding pre-prepared or pre-programmed responses that can move the conversation forward in an apparently meaningful way (e.g. by responding to any input that contains the word 'MOTHER' with 'TELL ME MORE ABOUT YOUR FAMILY').[9] Thus an illusion of understanding is generated, even though the processing involved has been merely superficial. ELIZA showed that such an illusion is surprisingly easy to generate, because human judges are so ready to give the benefit of the doubt when conversational responses are capable of being interpreted as "intelligent".