How Artificial Intelligence Is Making Chatbots Better For Businesses

Just a few short years ago, having "conversations" in human languages with machines was pretty much universally a frustratingly comedic process. While natural language processing (NLP) and recognition is far from perfect, thanks to machine learning algorithms it's getting increasingly closer to a point where it will be harder to tell whether we are talking to a human or a computer. Business has capitalized on this, with increasing numbers of chatbots deployed, usually in customer service functions but increasingly in internal processes and to assist in training. At ICLR 2018 in Vancouver, Salesforce's chief scientist, Richard Socher, presented seven breakthrough pieces of research covering practical advances in NLP including summarization, machine translation and question answering. He told me "NLP is going to be incredibly important for business – it is going to fundamentally change how we provide services, how we understand sales processes and how we do marketing.