Chatting with robots

Improving customer service, acting as a personal assistant or providing a new, user-friendly interface: chatbots are employable in many ways. Belgian start-up company Craftworkz is building machines that speak with people in natural language. In the world of e-commerce, providing an outstanding level of customer support can be quite a challenge, especially in terms of scalability. Customers usually go online at night, when there's no customer support available. Furthermore, when they all get in touch with the service desk at the same time they are clogging it up, and often the support they need is related to a frequently asked question.