Why Is Sentiment Analysis Fundamental to Chatbot Development?

The industrial revolution replaced workers with machines, forcing more of them towards the services sector. The digital revolution is now attacking this area through chatbots that aim to be at least as good as entry-level customer service representatives or shopping assistants. Gartner says that by 2020, the customer will manage 85% of their interactions with a company without dealing with a human. The goal is to create conversational instances which don't sound or behave like robots, but as human-like as possible. To achieve this ambitious target, the chatbot needs to understand language, context, tone and even subtle nuances like sarcasm. The tool which can enhance this is sentiment analysis, a process which automatically extracts both the topic and the feeling from the sentence or voice input.