Ultimate Guide to Leveraging NLP & Machine Learning for your Chatbot

Chatbots, are a hot topic and many companies are hoping to develop bots to have natural conversations indistinguishable from human ones, and many are claiming to be using NLP and Deep Learning techniques to make this possible. But with all the hype around AI it's sometimes difficult to tell fact from fiction. In this series I want to go over some of the Deep Learning techniques that are used to build conversational agents, starting off by explaining where we are right now, what's possible, and what will stay nearly impossible for at least a little while. Retrieval-based models (easier) use a repository of predefined responses and some kind of heuristic to pick an appropriate response based on the input and context. The heuristic could be as simple as a rule-based expression match, or as complex as an ensemble of Machine Learning classifiers.