Deep Learning for Chatbots, Part 1 – Introduction

Chatbots, also called Conversational Agents or Dialog Systems, are a hot topic. Microsoft is making big bets on chatbots, and so are companies like Facebook (M), Apple (Siri), Google, WeChat, and Slack. There is a new wave of startups trying to change how consumers interact with services by building consumer apps like Operator or x.ai, bot platforms like Chatfuel, and bot libraries like Howdy's Botkit. Microsoft recently released their own bot developer framework. 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.