what on earth is a ChatBot

A BOT is an AI software that is capable of doing things without human intervention.

What is a Chatbot & what does it do?

A Chatbot (also called as: Talkbot, Chatterbot, Bot, IM bot, Interactive agent, Artificial Conversational Entity) is a BOT which can converse (via auditory/textual methods) with Humans in their language (eg. English or Sanskrit or German).

How do we measure the performance of a Chatbot?

If a chatbot can fool you into making you believe that it is a human, we can call it a success. This criteria comes from the concept of Turing test which has been named after the British mathematician and computer pioneer Alan Turing who proposed the same in a 1950 paper titled Computing Machinery and Intelligence.

How does it do it?
Simply put: It usually just scans the written query, then pull a reply with the most matching keywords or the most similar wording pattern from a database to answer the query - An advanced chatbot would use NLP (Natural Language Processing).

A Chatbot can either be Rule-based or AI/ML-based.

A Rule-based bot answers questions based on predefined rules/logic & data. Problem is that such bots usually fail in answering questions whose pattern does not match with the rules.

An AI-based bot learns from the interactions it has with the end users. Behind this learnings there are analytics platforms, and integrations with APIs, among other things, that feed the AI and provide resources so that that the chatbot is able to provide the user with correct answers.

What can Chatbots actually do?

Some of the most come use-cases for Chatbots:

a) Virtual Assistants:

Used to answer simple questions, help users book services, get more information about a specific topic, buy a product, etc. - all of this available 24*7.

b) Idea Generation

c) Automation of manual processes

d) Analysis of unstructured data & making predictions using the same

Some popular example of Chatbots that have outgrown into Virtual Assistants:
[1] Siri by Apple

Siri is a voice-driven assistant that talks back to you and proactively recommends actions to take.

[2] Jarvis by Mark Zuckerberg

Jarvis is a home assistant and has been programmed to control household items like the Zuckerber's toaster or house lights.

[3] Alexa by Amazon

Alexa is an AI-based voice recognition system, which allows you to ask it questions or execute certain functions through commands, in order to get a “smart home”. It operates with devices such as lights, watches, thermostats, etc.

a recent movie based on the life & challenging times of the great Alan Turing

Sources:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatbot

Chatbotslife.com/chatbots-the-very-first-the-latest-d029331d91af

Medium.com/botsupply/chatbot-101-everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-chatbots-478c0b825dd0

Medium.com/botsupply/3-simple-steps-to-customer-service-automation-with-ai-f7d2485e34c7

Youtube.com/watch?v=3wLqsRLvV-c

Worldsbestchatbot.com/The_Loebner_Prize

dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1556341
Google.co.in/search?tbm=isch&q=dilbert+ai