Member-only story
What is a chatbot, and how does it work?
Interview with a chatbot
Let’s humanize a chatbot and pretend it can be interviewed — how would it describe what it is, and what happens when it receives a user inquiry?
What a chatbot is
— Interviewer: “Hey Ms Chatbot, how are you doing?”
— Ms Chatbot: “Hello Ms Interviewer! I’m doing great! How are you?”
— Interviewer: “Ready for the interview! Are you ready?”
— Ms Chatbot: “I am! Enough with the small talk… let’s get started!”
— Interviewer: “Very well, let’s start from the basics… what are you guys, exactly?”
— Ms Chatbot: “We, the chatbots, are software that can understand what humans type using their own language, and give them a coherent answer in the same language”
— Interviewer: “Got it. So, where does your name come from?”
— Ms Chatbot: “The word chatbot is the short form of chatterbot, you know, which was coined by Michael Mauldin in 1994. He put together the term chat, that stands for conversation, and the abbreviation bot that stands for robot.”
— Interviewer: “So… you’re basically robots that can converse with humans, right?”
— Ms Chatbot: “Pretty much… but there are distinctions. The expression chatbot can indeed be used to address all types of Conversational Interfaces, because all of us are bots and all of us chat. However, the word chatbot most commonly refers to a bot that interacts via a graphic web chat, using text or visual elements but not speech… ’cause if it does use speech, it is called a voicebot, not a chatbot.”
— Interviewer: “That’s good to know! And how do you manage to chat with humans through a web chat?”
— Ms Chatbot: “In order to work, chatbots need to have at least three components: one module to understand human language, one to build an answer and one other to provide the answer… wait, why don’t we use an example to look more closely at how we work?”
