Machine Learning or Linguistic Rules: Two Approaches to Building a Chatbot

"It gets better over time" may be the leading slogan for artificial intelligence (AI) these days. Is "better later" acceptable in today's marketplace? How long should we wait for AI to become great? For a company that is trying to decide whether to use chatbots to serve customers, those questions matter. Because companies know that interactions are probably going to begin with a question, they need to program customer service chatbots to determine the intent of the message -- i.e., what it is the customer wants.