Chatbots: Are they Really Useful?

Abstract

Chatbots are computer programs that interact with users using natural lan- guages. This technology started in the 1960’s; the aim was to see if chatbot systems could fool users that they were real humans. However, chatbot sys- tems are not only built to mimic human conversation, and entertain users. In this paper, we investigate other applications where chatbots could be useful such as education, information retrival, business, and e-commerce. A range of chatbots with useful applications, including several based on the ALICE/AIML architecture, are presented in this paper.