Chatbots a different approach for messaging

6 Pages·2018·1.237 MB·English

by  Militaru Bogdan Alexandru

Chatbots a different approach for messaging
Bogdan Alexandru Militaru,
Electronic Engineering and Intelligent Systems,
University from Pitesti
Pitesti, Romania
[email protected]
Abstract - This article shows general informations and
different issues of usage about chatbots. Also shows a
new way of usage of these in a new domain, throw these
can be used to send alerts and notifications to many
users.
Keywords - chatbot, artificial intelligence, business,
online services
I. INTRODUCTION
This article shows issues of a new gambler began to offers support in this directions and
in industry which will change in short time the integration services with different platforms which
technology businesses. As we can see, we live in an they are maintaining [2].
age where IT domain it’s changing faster, because Among the most used platforms is
every day new technologies are launched, new highlighted: Facebook, individual websites, Slack,
programming languages, new electronic devices or Twitter, Skype, Kik, Telegram, Whatsapp, WeChat,
electronics, smartphones, computers and more and and others. In figures 2 it can be observed statistics
more the phenomenon IOT (internet of things) in percentage of different users from different
escalate. But in this story was launched subtle a new platforms and selected options from different
idea, chatbot, care in my opinion represents the developers or companies [3].
beginning into a new way, beside of those known by
us until now about automatization. A. Backgrounds of usage
What is a chatbot ? A chatbot represents The chatbots can be used in different
an application or a software system which allow a workspaces, because as it was presented previously,
conversation of type audio or textual. Thus programs they can be used in many industries to inform clients
are developed have as main objective the simulation regarding to the activity domain of company. Among
of a conversation like a human partner, passing the the most used workspaces can be highlighted: e-
Turing test. The main purpose that was build for it is
to solve the problem of systems of communications
form different domains like client systems or
information acquisitions. Some chatbots uses
systems of type conversational, integrating parts 15%
from artificial intelligence, while others it focus to
recognize keywords comes from speaker and answer
with the right keyword or pattern, from the
database[1].
25%
60%
II. USAGE IN INDUSTRY
The majority of industries heard about
Chatbots for the first time between years 2015 and
2016. Since with year 2016 these started to be
requested by market and 54% from programmers
started to research and develop [2]. The true
Before 2015 2015 2016
booming, is due to big companies from IT domains,
such as Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, etc. , which Fig. 1 - Usage of chatbots by years
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90 70
67.5
52.5
45
22.5
35
0
k y k r e k m p t r
boo Ma Slac witte kyp Ki gra sap Cha Othe
Face T S Tele What We 17.5
Fig. 2 - Platforms that support integration with
chatbots
commerce, assurance, healthcare, sales, health,
logistics, recruitment, technology. No wonder these 0
ectjrohnauavnrtisnbriaoto ltnoissmf,t iaacesr n twittchsole eryska ar aerane nd de pi nrnivefndio rroowmmnhmaiitncieoahnnn ts ttt hlhwyea itt dheri exsaqtpnruli obiirniuetct eirtodietn aa snbeoidycf M Watson wit.ai rosoft Bot Chatfuel ndorabots Robot.me Octane.ai
information is very important but expensive. IB Mic Pa
Fig. 4 - Most used platforms to build chatbots
90
For companies, it is extremely important to diminish
these costs, so the smallest form of automation is
valuable and important financial exponent. Let's do
an imaginative exercise and suppose we have 3
67.5 editors writing news about a company's new
products, besides those 3 editors, there are three
more people who need to share the articles written to
readers in different online environments, or offline,
but if we look again at Figure 2, companies offering
integration with chatbots, we can notice an extremely
45
large audience, and this is not accidental. Thus,
instead of the three people who distribute the
materials, for the online environment, work can be
done by a single person who supervises the bots
activity and introduces the materials to be distributed
to the chatbot system.
22.5
Businesses that will have the biggest
advantage of chatbots services are, of course, those
that interact with the public and are dependent on
readers or users of the services offered by them.
0 These business areas include Custom Services, Sales
Servicii Custom nzari/Marketing der Processing Social Media Payments Recuritment Other oPtBhra.e ysmMe emaMnratkosye,s tbtiR enu egshce,i rdgu hOpitllmiragdtehefnotre tr,dm P eisrnt oct oFc. e iAbgsusu iiprnledeg r 3,cc .he naSttoabcgoietas l grMapehd ioaf,
a Or As expected, major software developers
V
have begun offering services that companies or
Fig. 3 - Most important businesses for chatbots
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individuals can create on their own such chatbot
systems.
Among developers, IBM Watson, wit.ai,
Microsoft Bot, Chatfuel, Pandorabots, Rebot.me,
octane.ai can be highlighted in Figure 4. But the best
option so far is IBM Watson, capturing a market
Fig. 6 - Principle of conversational chatbot
61%, 41% prefer to adopt Microsoft Bot Framework
and 45% consider that the services provided by
wai.ai are what they need for their companies. These of a Natural Linguistic Processing (NLP) system that
developers provide via platforms, general searches for a set of rules established by the
configurations that can be applied to some user developer through a CMS or keywords known,
categories so they can benefit from their own predefined and established by the developer or
chatbots. learned during the execution of the system. As soon
as the web-service has an answer, it is forwarded to
III. METHODS OF IMPLEMENTATION the client application and is displayed to the user.
Overall, their operating principle is simple B. Conversational Chatbot
and similar to server-side applications, because in
fact a chatbot uses the same principle. The customer Unlike the decision mode, this type of
(the client application) to which a user is logged chatbot is capable of responding with much greater
sends a message to the server, and he / she must accuracy, depending on the query or request made to
interpret the message to identify one or more the server. The main reason why such a system is
keywords so as to allow a valid response that much better organized and the answers have a much
corresponds to the user's question or request. On the higher success rate is that sentences are analyzed
same principle, any chat application works, only that with the help of artificial intelligence, practically
the web-service has the role of intermingling every question the car is able to learn the only new
messages between two or more clients, while in the forms of questions for which it can provide the same
case of a chatbot, it replaces the interlocutor. type of response. Also, such a system is much more
expensive, and the development and maintenance
There are two types of chatbots: based on time is increased unlike the decision-making process.
rules (decision-making) and able to carry a A strong point of this type of chatbot is that the
conversation (conversational). response can come from a single reply, while in the
decision-making process, the user has to take several
A. Decision chatbot steps to reach the desired answer. It is preferable to
develop such a system if the application to be
This type of chatbot is a rudimentary one, developed has as its main purpose an increased
capable of responding based on a set of predefined interaction with the user, in which he has to give
rules, so the user receives a response based on more explanations or specifications, in which case a
keywords from his question. The failure rate in this decision-making chatbot would fail.
case is much higher because the rule set number is
limited. The fact that the chatbot questions are The operating principle briefly exemplified
usually set by the developer, and the user has the in Figure 6, considers chatbot as a Facebook Chatbot
choice of one of the available answers for that application, so the user will send an HTTP request to
question. the Facebook Messenger client application, which in
turn sends the HTTP request to the BOT server, this
The operating principle follows a route application is processed by the server, and a NLP
defined in Figure 5. Thus, the client application at (Natural Linguistic Processing) request will be
the end of which the user is, whether Facebook, forwarded to process the user's message with
Slack, Skype, Whatsapp, etc., sends a request to the artificial intelligence. After the process finishes, the
web-service, this request is processed with the help BOT sever receives a JSON type response and passes
it forward to the FB Messenger client application and
finally to the user.
IV. ANOTHER WAY OF USAGE
If so far, in this article, we have approached
common topics, which show general information
about what the chatters are and how they can be
used, in this caption I intended to present another
way how they can be used. There is an increased
attraction for what, in terms of specialty, is called -
scrapping data, which involves automated searching
on the Internet, replacing the human agent. And with
Fig. 5 - Principle of decision chatbot [6]
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• The data update - the chances of the item being
searched for expiring after the x minutes
configuration (10 in the previous example) are
very low, so the availability increases and the
number of verified offers also drops, basically
reaching the first specified advantage;
• Avoiding annoying pop-up ads on various sites,
which, from the user's point of view, create a state
of nervousness and interrupt the search process;
• Freedom to manage the list of search sites in one
place, allowing you to browse sites that you may
Fig. 7 - Configuratie in aplicatie web not have originally looked at;
• Sensation of freedom - we often do not want to
embrace such responsibilities that we do not want
the emergence of this new area called chatbot, I
to do;
thought the two could be integrated so they could
collect and transmit information to a target audience • Economics - Receiving strict alarms on the subject
set init can reduce costs if the user would have
without considering any of the operations as a crime.
made a direct search on the site and would have
noticed other products he would have added to the
Thus, the system referred to is intended for
cart;
people who do not have the time to search for certain
information on the Internet, information that involves
C. Disadvantages
filtering data according to certain features. And since
any innovation comes from need, it requires the
purchase of a good, product or service, and then • Possibility to check other results outside the times
set for notifications, without resetting the initial
there is a need to notify it.
configurations;
Basically, the application whose principles • Different limitations regarding the messages sent
according to the platform chosen for receiving
will be described in the following rows suggests to
alerts;
do a search in place of an individual based on some
critical chatbot description criteria to set a rule basis.
D. Configuration
These settings will be made individually for each

user individually, once with the possibility of being
How to configure chatbot can be done in
modified later on, initiating the conversation with the
two ways depending on how you use it. If it is
chatbot. It will record the profile and configuration
intended to be used with Facebook Messenger, it
you choose and will search for that individual on
allows the use of the buttons, basically the
different sites, depending on the options selected in
configuration can be made from inside the
the configuration menu.
Messenger application (eg Figure 8), but in other
applications that allow only text messages such as
Because an example is convincing in the
Whatsapp, it would be necessary an extra work from
face of late specifications, let's say we want to look
the user to send "pick x", "yes", "no" messages to
for an apartment for rent in Pitesti, Trivale district for
make certain selections possible, which is why a
an amount between 200 and 400 euros, we want to
method that includes all these services is creating a
search on several sites ads, let's say 3, but above
special web interface , as can be seen in Figure 7.
these criteria it is desirable to find the ads in the last
10 minutes to receive notifications from hour to hour.
The main configuration menu will be
There is a possibility to do this manually using
resumed every 1 hour if there are other messages and
advanced search forms, but this process should be
it is not in the foreground to allow reconfiguration if
done for each site and several times a day, but it
the user needs such a request.
would also be much easier to send these notifications
automatically through a socialization channel, thus
reducing the costs that are actually in time. Of
course, this example can be extended to a completely
different area.
A. Advantages
• As the main advantage, it's time, the time you
spend configuring the chatbot is definitely much
smaller than the search you make on multiple sites;
• Efficiency in finding the right results - not always Fig. 8 - In application configuration
the site we want to look for is a familiar or friendly
one;
�5
Fig. 10 - Webscrapping principle of work [8]
facilitate quick access to information without the
need for a user to lose a variable amount of time in
different periods of the day, month or year, and to
evade the process by setting alarms.
Also, as I mentioned at the beginning of this
chapter, with regard to the date of scrapping, the
border between legal and illegal is very small. The
scrapping principle involves a technique by which a
computer extracts normal human readable data from
another computer [4]. The reason why chatbot does
not reach the illegality is that the purpose in which
these search processes are used has nothing to
contradict the reason why the site was created. Data-
scrapping is perceived as illegal when the data
extracted from the content of a website is used for
purposes such as extracting personal data and using
it for its own purposes also generates large traffic
that harms owners [5] .
Fig. 9 - Notification example [7]
F. Costs
D. The way to receive notifications
This subchapter can be viewed from two
Due to the variety of social platforms and perspectives. On the one hand, the developer's cost
their api offerings, notifications and alerts can be of purchasing a web-service + chatbot, scrapper,
sent directly as text messages, like a chat or out of database, and other related services such as web
the bay area: email or browser notifications. Among configurator for search forms, presentation site, user
the services that support chat integration can be guide. They also add development costs that for an
Facebook Messenger, Slack, Skype, Whatsapp, early stage would materialize in the equivalent of 3
Telegram, etc. months of development.
Messages will be sent as web addresses All these costs must be covered, so the
with the ability to also receive brief article reason why it was created should also bring revenue
information such as short description, title or price, for development and service maintenance, these
such an example being noted in Figure 6 through costs being felt in one form or another by the user,
integration with Facebook Messenger. It is excluded this being the second prospect of costs can be seen.
that the user's contact information or user With regard to usage plans, it can be divided into 2:
information is displayed in the content of the
attachment of the web address because the • A free plan that requires the user to use the chatbot
application does not intend to be a competitor for the services free of charge, receiving certain ads with
sites within which the searches are made. or without linking to the selected search criteria;
• Another plan that allows ads to be excluded of any
form, the only notifications received being those
E. Legal Terms set, based on a subscription;
From the point of view of property rights V. CONCLUSION
such a chatbot does not violate any of the rules of the
partner websites because the application developer In conclusion, you can say that for me as a
reserves neither the right of the articles nor retains software developer, this is the next point of interest
information about the users or the articles posted by because it is an interesting topic, untapped enough
them . The primary and unique objective is also to and it is still in the beginning, especially in Romania.
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Most companies could automate their contact or
public relations services with such systems and
replace the existing FAQ because this new way of
socializing with a human interlocutor creates a
pleasant state and also a possible desire to
collaborate with a company is continually evolving
from several perspectives.
With regard to the notifications and alarms
application, they foresee a possible success as people
make different shopping on specialized sites more
and more and the time they spend on such searches is
increasing, so it would reduce the time spent in front
of the computer, the cost of doing additional
shopping, which turns out to be most unnecessary.
In my opinion, chatters represent the next
level of evolution in technology and it takes only a
while for the public to understand the real power this
new area of technology has and will exploit it.
REFERENCES
1. Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Chatbot
2. Chatbots Survey 2017 http://mindbowser.com/
chatbot-market-survey-2017/
3. Quora https://www.quora.com/How-do-
chatbots-work
4. Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Data_scraping
5. Illegal Data Scrapping https://
resources.distilnetworks.com/all-blog-posts/is-
web-scraping-illegal-depends-on-what-the-
meaning-of-the-word-is-is
6. Google Images https://goo.gl/images/iS6uBy
7. Google Images https://goo.gl/images/N2uudM
8. Incapsula https://www.incapsula.com/web-
application-security/web-scraping-attack.html