What is a Chatbot? How does a Chatbot Work? How can I create my own Chatbot? with an example

Recently the time we spend on internet, interacting with people in our contact list or surfing is increasing.

Recently Artificial Intelligence, Chatbots became buzz words and people are experimenting with lots of different chatbots now a days. In this current scenario, its very important to know, what is a chatbot, internals and how does a chatbot work, and how can you create your own Chatbot.

In this article I am going to address the above three questions that each one of us should know. I will also give you some examples of Chatbots to make a beginner understand better.

What is a chatbot?

A chatbot is an interactive bot, whom you can ask to perform certain tasks like you chat with one of your friend in your contact list. I understands your intent, in case of ambiguity it will clarify by striking a conversation with you.


You can greet it like you chat with your friend. It understands your greetings and greet you back like any other normal person.

TechCrunch Chatbot: greetings 

You can ask it to perform certain simple tasks like "Get me top trending articles" / "hey show me top trending articles". The TechCrunch Chatbot understands that you are interested in trending articles and fetches you those. Isn't it like magic.

TechCrunch ChatBot: Top Trending Articles

You can also also more specific queries like "articles on Uber". The TechCrunch Chatbot understands that you want articles that contain the keyword "Uber", and fetches you the exact articles containing the keyword "Uber". Isn't it awesome.

TechCrunch ChatBot: Articles on Uber

These Chatbots are improving at an exponential speed, and completely change the way you interact with a website like TechCrunch. Thats great isn't it. Now next question comes how on earth they are able to do that.

How does a Chatbot work?

A Chatbot analyses the messages that a user has entered using Natural Language Processing Engine and identifies your intent, prepares a query based on its understanding and executes that query, gets related information form its datasource, formulates a message in human consumable format using predefined templates and a powerful Natural Language Processing Engine and updates the user. The Chatbot also maintains the context and in case of ambiguity, it will try to resolve by interacting with you in simple human consumable language.

At a high level this is how a Chatbot understands and chat with you like any other person.

ChatBot

Now we understand how a Chatbot works on a high level, now lets see how we can create a Chatbot without having to worry about heavy Machine Learning algorithms or Artificial Intelligence.

How can I create my own Chatbot?

There are lot of APIs available to build your own Chatbots, below is a tutorial on how to use amazon's lex to create a Chatbot of your own