Building Chatbots – Introduction
This is really a hot topic these days: Chatbots . In this tutorial, we’re diving in the world of chatbots and how they are built.
What are chatbots?
Chatbots are systems that can have a fairly complex conversation with humans. They can go by different names: Conversational Agents or Dialog Systems . As you’ve probably guessed, chatbots use a lot of Natural Language Processing techniques in order to understand the human’s requests.
The Holy Grail of chatbot builders is to pass the Turing Test. This means that a human can’t figure out that he’s talking to an actual human. Although we are pretty far from that, (especially from a Natural Language Generation point of view) great progress has been made.
Most of the chatbots that are built these days are goal-oriented agents. This means that they will steer the conversation towards achieving a certain predefined goal. We can have customer support agents that figure out what the problem the user is facing and then solving it (or just opening a ticket).
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