Predictions for Chatbots in 2018

With 80% of engagement, chatbot is now eyeing for a perfect score of 100 for the number of companies adopting the technology. Chatbot has revolutionised the customer experience with a personalised touch. Whatsapp is planning to adopt chatbots very soon. Facebook and Apple have already pioneered the trend with customer chat and business chat respectively.

Launched in 2017, Facebook's Customer chat allows you to continue the conversation when you come out of the website via the messenger app. Whereas Apple has discovered the business chat under its efforts to smoothen the client-business conversations and facilitate it in a direct way. How can we forget Google assistant and Alexa majorly installed and implemented on echo dots by Amazon?

In order to ensure validated business and client conversations accompanied by automated responses, companies will only begin to see what chatbot has to offer. With 30% conversations predicted to be via voice bots, a subsidiary of chatbots is only starting to enter the game. The companies embracing the conversational interfaces are able to realise that chatbot is not keen on replacing agents from the agent-customer duo rather upgrading the status and validating the correctness of the same.

The fear that there will be lesser jobs in the field for agents is a hoax. Although one cannot deny but agree to the fact that the technology will never match up to the problem-solving skills to that of humans or show empathy equivalent to humans. Nevertheless, the chatbot compiled with artificial intelligence can support the agents to bring about error-free results. The technology is doing its part and the decision-making is left with the human agent. Moreover, the insights gained via the chatbot database will act as a repository to understand consumer behaviour and needs. This will further create a demand for text analytics tools.

Communication chatbots will jump their way out of the various intermediary steps and directly connect the client to the business. More than one million bots created on Facebook messenger will push for it to release more tools for developers and aid in behavioural marketing.

Google Deepmind published a paper on AlphaGo Zero. Created without help from data from human games, it will metamorphose the way artificial intelligence will be used by the software. AlphaGo Zero brings numerous combinations of data and the increased number of iterations will bring simple results. This is extremely crucial for chatbots as it has to perform next level of conversations with the user.

Strangely, almost all the messaging platforms are shifting to the UI for chatbots after positive feedback from startups. Every business is very specific and clear about what kind of API, platform and chatbot they require. This clarity is giving birth to amazing level of commitments.

There has been a collaboration going on between chatbots and blockchain. A company called Sensay has launched Sense Token to strengthen its team of advisers via bot and help them continue offering their services.

As per the findings, the chatbots will be laudable co-pilots. They will enable a better way to address the alerts and lacunae with a heads-up beforehand. This way the human pilot has less on the hands to deal with. This increases the efficiency of the pilot. The bots are not just meant to interact with the outer world comprising the humans but also with other bots. When in charge of specific tasks, the inter-bot interaction can create an enlarged and well-organised network to function abnegating any potential error.

There is a contradiction to those who believe that new technology and that too in the form of chatbots is eventually going to reduce the human percentage. Contrary to this, the chatbots will increase the demands for HR support. The management of chatbot requires skills and thus there will an upsurge in the salaries of the related persons. As one cannot totally rely on the technology the human support will keep a check on it and repair it when in case of failure.