Does a Bot Need Natural Language Processing? – Chatbots Magazine

One of the most exciting things about the rise of chatbots is their use of artificial intelligence -- especially machine learning -- to mass-accomplish tasks that neither an army of interns nor an army of experts could match, and to derive wisdom beyond that of the crowd by analyzing the crowd's billions of conversations with cold math. Yet anyone who chats with a few bots knows the frequent frustration: This thing doesn't understand what I'm saying. There are basically two kinds of chatbots in early 2017, while natural language processing is still learning to understand human conversational speech: Bots that risk trying to parse anything you type at them, and bots that limit your input to a few safe option buttons. Octane AI, which publishes Chatbots Magazine, currently opts for the button approach. But of course we wonder ourselves: Is that doomed?