Let’s Chat About Chatbots

A Brief History of Chatbots and its Evolution

This image has been taken from Freepik.com

Introduction

While surfing a website, you must have come across a popup with an image of a person with headset and a chat window, intriguing you to ask a question. That, as you may already know, is a chatbot. Instead of scanning through the whole website, chatbots provide a quick and easier way of handling our queries and briefing about the services of the company.

Chatbots have been trending in the recent years, but it is not a new concept. The term “ChatterBot” was first coined by Michael Mauldin in 1994, but the first chatbot was created in the 1960s. A chatbot is a dialogue system that simulates the behaviour of a human conversing with a user.

So from where did it all started?

Inspired by the Turing test, Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor at MIT, developed a program ELIZA which imitated a therapist asking open-ended questions. It constantly interacted with the user by generating a response to the user queries. The program would break up the query into words and assign a value to each of them. The value of the word was determined by its importance within the sentence. It used pattern matching and substitution methodology to reorder the words in the form of a question. Sometimes, it just rephrased the query by emphasizing on the word with the greatest weight. If ELIZA couldn’t find a pattern to respond to, it used some default responses like “Can you elaborate on that?”.

For example, let the input be, “I WANT TO SLEEP ALL DAY.”. ELIZA assigns a weighted value to each word of that sentence. ELIZA attributes low values to pronouns (I), slightly higher values to action verbs (want to), and the highest value to the actual action (sleep all day). This helps ELIZA to flip around the input into a human response, by simply turning the values into a question, flipping the pronoun, and switching the verb to convey meaning. Thereby responding “What if you never got TO SLEEP ALL DAY?”

Sometimes, the conversation moved forward in meaningful way, while other times a meaningless response was given. Even though ELIZA’s response was limited, it became quite popular and inspired other scientists in the field.

A timeline of some other notable chatbots:
1972 - Kenneth Mark Colby, a computer scientist and psychiatrist at Stanford, developed a chatbot PARRY, which behaved as a paranoid schizophrenic patient. Due to the programmed behaviour of shifting the weightage of the input verbs, its response prompted the user to elaborate himself more.
1984 - William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter developed RACTER (short for raconteur- meaning storyteller), an AI program that generated random English language prose. It even wrote a book, “The Policeman’s Beard is Half-constructed: Computer Prose and Poetry”.
1988 - Rollo Carpenter created Jabberwacky, an entertaining chatbot, that learnt new responses based on real-time user interactions, rather than being driven from a static database.
1991 - Creative Labs released DR. SBAITSO, a fully voice operated AI psychologist program for MS-DOS based systems. SBAITSO was an acronym for Sound Blaster Artificial Intelligent Text to Speech Operator.
1995 - A.L.I.C.E. (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) uses Artificial Intelligence Mark-up Language (an XML dialect for creating natural language software agents), which allowed more sophisticated conversations. Its code is available as open-source.
2001- SMARTER CHILD, a precursor to Apple’s Siri and Samsung’s S Voice, provided information from the web. It was deployed on instant messaging services.

With advancements in the field of natural language processing and AI, virtual assistants cam into existence.
2010 - Apple’s Siri, a voice based personal assistant. It is from here, that the virtual assistants started gaining recognition.
2012 - Google now makes recommendations based on user activity.
2015 - Amazon Alexa added the concept of home automation through speech processing.
2015 - Microsoft Cortana
2016 - Tay (discussed later in limitations section)

Microsoft

An Honourable Mention
I hope you remember Office Assistant a.k.a. Clippit, Microsoft Office’s intelligent user interface. Even though, it is not a chatbot but it can be considered as a precursor to them. Working with the Microsoft help section, Clippit offered help for using the Office products.

Why Chatbots? And Where to Use Them?

Responding to the customer’s query quickly and efficiently greatly enhances customer experience. Many a times, customers get irritated when they can not retrieve the required information. Calling customer support is the last thing they do, knowing the long waiting time and uncertain support. This is where chatbots win the game. Since they are available 24/7 and are not affected by the volume of customer queries, therefore they not only help in retaining customers but also lower the costs of maintaining human customer support.

“265 billion customer support requests are made every year, and it costs businesses a whopping $1.3 trillion to service them.” -IBM

1. Chatbots are mainly used in assisting customer service and in marketing automation.
2. They are being widely used in e-commerce, financial institution, educational, news, and health websites.
3. These are also being used for internal activities in companies, such as when requesting sick leave.
4. It is also being used in toys, e.g. Hello Barbie.
5. A chatbot on WhatsApp has been deployed for queries related to Covid-19.
6. Malicious Use: Spamming, befriending for illegal and harmful activities.

It all looks so nice! But wait…

Even though there has been a lot of improvement in this field, but still there are some limitations which include:

1. Limited Knowledge Base, thus unable to process unsaved queries.
2. Limitations in NLP(accent problems, language barriers), thus affecting its user base.
3. Difficulty in managing non-linear conversations. Chatbots cannot handle the situations when the conversation goes back and forth on a topic.
4. Microsoft created an AI chatbot, Tay, which simulated a teenage girl that learns from previous interactions. They experimented on it by deploying it on Twitter. Tay’s algorithm was trained on a anonymized public dataset and was programmed to discover patterns of language through social media interactions. Initially, Tay interacted harmlessly but in few hours, she started tweeting highly offensive things. Tay had to be removed within 16 hours of its deployment. This behaviour could be a proof of the social media’s inherent toxicity, where people bring out their worst. Even though Microsoft was criticized for its AI bot, the event opened up the difficulties of an AI bot that could be easily corrupted when deployed in the open world. Learning from its failures, some months later, Microsoft released Zo, a “politically correct” version of the original bot.

Difference between Virtual Assistant and Chatbot

Chatbots are mainly used in customer services, for knowledge acquisition. Whereas, virtual assistant is more of a personal agent, assisting in daily activities such as scheduling, typing, getting directions, booking reservations, etc. So, it’s mainly the application area where these two differ.

Conclusion

Looking from a particular business perspective, chatbots have greatly evolved, there are a lot of examples where chatbots have made life easier and more efficient. They efficiently do the tasks assigned to them in a particular domain, but the problem arises when looking from the perspective of AI in chatbot. Due to limited knowledge base, they cannot respond meaningfully to all queries. Since we are still unclear of what AI really is, we cannot achieve it’s full potential.

I would like to quote John McCarthy here, who said, “when something starts to work, people will cease to call it artificial intelligence”.

References

• Wikipedia contributors. (2020, August 21). Chatbot. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chatbot&oldid=974166776
• Futurism. The history of chatbots. https://futurism.com/images/the-history-of-chatbots-infographic
• Oscar Schwartz. (Nov 25, 2019). In 2016, Microsoft’s Racist Chatbot Revealed the Dangers of Online Conversation. https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/artificial-intelligence/machine-learning/in-2016-microsofts-racist-chatbot-revealed-the-dangers-of-online-conversation
• Naveen Joshi. (Dec 23, 2018). Yes, Chatbots And Virtual Assistants Are Different! https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2018/12/23/yes-chatbots-and-virtual-assistants-are-different/#2b7b7c6b6d7d