Chatbot 101:

An Introduction to Chatbot Technology

This image is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

What is a chatbot?

Chatbots are artificial intelligence technologies that communicate and interact with people using natural languages such as English and Malay sentences to accomplish specific tasks in a specific domain or on a specific topic.

It offers a conversational question-and-answer format as well as screen tools that mimic human assistance.

Chatbots can be deployed to many channels/platforms including:

Instant messaging service (e.g. Whatsapp, Telegram, Messenger)
Web-based applications (e.g. popup window with customer service help)
Standalone applications

Screenshot of BECA Bot, the chatbot for cancer awareness

Why chatbots?

Available 24/7/365
Instant feedback
Timely
Engaging
Simultaneous service to unlimited users
Personalized feedback to the users
Intuitive platform

Chatbots Usage

Education
- Examples: Eggbun Education, CikguAIBot, Mondly, ELSA, Cognii, mongoose
Healthcare
- Examples: WHO, MedWhat, buoy, Woebot, Healthily, youper
Retail
- Examples: Dominos, H&M, Sephora, eBay, Sephora, Nivea, Nike, Whole Foods
Others
- Examples: AirAsia, NBC Politics, National Geographic

This image is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Chatbot Development Approaches

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Messenger chat vector created by freepik and Robot face vector created by pch.vector - www.freepik.com.

Two main approaches for developing a chatbot are:

Rule-based
- Keyword-driven
- Chatbots respond mainly based on manually drafted rules
- Difficult to scale up the chatbot

Artificial intelligence-powered
- Driven by machine learning to get "smarter" over time
- Employ Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand user inputs
- Highly scalable due to a broader range of decision-making skills