Simulated Human Conversations & ChatBots

ELIZA (The first ChatBot)

In 1950, Alan Turing’s famous article “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” was published, which proposed what is now called the Turing test as a criterion of intelligence. The notoriety of Turing’s proposed test stimulated great interest in Joseph Weizenbaum’s program ELIZA, published in 1966 which seemed to be able to fool users into believing that they were conversing with a real human.

Malicious Use

Malicious Care is frequently used to fill chat rooms with spam and advertisements, by mimicking human behavior and conversations or to entice people into revealing personal information, such as bank account numbers. They are commonly found on Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger and other instant messaging protocols. There has also been a published report of a ChatBot used in a fake personal ad on a dating service’s website.

Tay, an AI ChatBot that learns from a previous interaction, caused major controversy due to it being targeted by internet trolls on Twitter. The bot was exploited, and after 16 hours began to send extremely offensive Tweets to users. This suggests that although the bot learned effectively from experience, adequate protection was not put in place to prevent misuse. If a text-sending algorithm can pass itself off as a human instead of a ChatBot, its message would be more credible. Therefore, human-seeming ChatBots with well-crafted online identities could start scattering fake news that seems plausible, for instance making false claims during a presidential election. With enough ChatBots, it might be even possible to achieve artificial social proof.

ChatBots & CRM

Customer support is rapidly changing. Over the past ten years, customer contact centers have evolved quite a lot to meet the rising popularity of various digital communication channels. Nevertheless, phone calls still account for about 68 percent of all incoming support requests; another 32 percent comes from various digital channels such as live chats, SMS, email, and social media.

• The key advantages of using ChatBots include: ChatBots greatly improve interactions with clients. Clients have questions and chatbots can give a lot of answers.
• ChatBots are integrated into messenger apps, where people spend most of their time online nowadays.
• ChatBots save considerable time for your customer support team.
• ChatBots offer clients immediate responses.
• ChatBots are available 24/7.
• ChatBots allow you to reduce costs by hiring fewer people to staff call centers.