Talking chatbots: Time to enhance customer experience ITProPortal.com

Facebook's annual F8 conference is an opportunity for the social media giant to showcase its latest technologies and developments to attendees from the developer community. One of the key announcements made at this year's conference was that Facebook will be developing its Facebook Messenger platform in order to cater to its growing business audience. Facebook Messenger will now allow third parties to interact with Facebook's one billion active users, and vice versa, via'chatbots'. A chatbot is a piece of software that is designed to simulate a conversation with a human user, in the interest of providing information or helping to complete a transaction. Chatbots use natural language processing, a type of artificial intelligence, to respond to commands or requests for information, which is a step-up from previous bots that simply scanned for keywords and sent users the most relevant reply from a database.