Sunday, February 20, 2011

Chat Bots review 3

Chat bots or chatterbots is a computer program that is designed to simulate intelligent conversation. Their main aim is to fool others into the belief that a particular output was produced by a human rather than by a simulated system. They can communicate with one or more humans or with other chatbots by textual or auditory methods and are capable of remembering the conversations. Such programs are sometimes referred to as Artificial Conversational Entities. They have an independent existence and can make conversations with one another and other humans and make memories that can be looked into. They are capable of handling many users usually on a time shared basis.

Most of them work based on pattern matching and/or pattern recognition and differ from other sophisticated natural language processing systems in the simplicity of their algorithms and their ease of implementation. Though these chatbots appear to interpret data and respond intelligently, they merely scan the input and select a reply with the most matching keywords or most similar word pattern from a textual database of response.

These programs satisfy Turing’s criterion of intelligence. According to this, a program is considered to be intelligent only if it is capable of impersonating a human in a conversation with another human such that it is not possible to judge between a program and a real person based on conversational content alone. Turing’s test determines how well a program is capable of appearing as a real person. The key feature that characterizes a program as a chatbot rather than as a natural language processor is its ability to produce sufficiently vague and non-specific replies that are easily misinterpreted as intelligent under a wide area of conversational contexts. The main focus is thus given to produce intelligent output and not in the clarity of the output.

The earliest of the chatbots in existence are ELIZA, PARRY and RACTER. They are basically natural language processing systems capable of conversing in English. ELIZA still serves as a model for other chatbots. It was written at MIT by Joseph Weizenbaum and published in 1966. ELIZA emulates a Rogerian psychotherapist. It was first implemented in Weizenbaum’s own SLIP list processing language. When conversing with ELIZA user types a sentence which is delimited by a period and the double carriage return serves to transfer the control to ELIZA. It has no keywords in its repository to match words from a non-English language, or the ability to detect the language the input is presented in. It operates by recognizing keywords in the input, comparing them with the database and producing the corresponding pre-programmed responses as output. These responses move the conversation forward in a meaningful way.

ELIZA showed that an illusion of conversing with a real person 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". ELIZA scripts exist in Welsh and German as well as in English. There are many programs based on ELIZA in different languages.

Nowadays chatbots are being commonly used in many offices as most people prefer to engage with human like programs. And some of them are ALICE, EWA etc. Chatbots are being used in interactive systems to respond to queries that of the user, that can easily be categorized. These programs can provide a friendly interface and are now employed as virtual assistants and provide accurate information. And since the bots can personally remember things about those they chat with, they will recognize someone who returns to your site and greet them by name, and can inquire into things they said on their last visit.

The chatbots can be programmed explicitly to make it perform the functions of our choice. The bots can be put to use in many places. They can put in any website and in mobile devices that support web applications. They can also be used for advertising and trading purposes. These bots can inform, amuse, survey, advertise, redirect, and more.

The chatbots have become very common and now more effort is being spent in developing bots that are smarter. Chatbots will soon be able to speak their responses out loud with a moving mouth that synchronises to what they are saying. They can be used in advanced system that displays advertisements that are relevant to the current topic of conversation. This makes for highly-focused advertising that has a much stronger likelihood of success than other advertisements.

And the more advanced bots that will be able to answer millions of trivia-type questions about science, facts, people, movies, books, and any topic that interests the user are still being developed.

No comments:

Post a Comment