If you’re a millennial, you’ll know , the first-ever instant messaging bot with natural language comprehension ability. It was developed in 2000 and demonstrated exceptional wit, which most of today’s bot cannot. SmarterChild used to chat with about 2,50,000 humans every day with funny, sad, and sarcastic emotions. Today, we’ve traveled a distance with technologies like AI, ML, NLP, etc. and bots like Xiaocle have passed Turing tests of 10 minutes (i.e. users couldn’t identify that they’re talking to a bot for about 10 minutes). SmarterChild | Social Chatbot Xiaoice It was launched in China by Microsoft in 2014 and is one of the most successful NLP (natural language processing) bots. Interestingly, the bot has learned to design images and patterns for fabrics based on words, themes, and key colors. Xiaoice has over 200 million users in Asia. | Automation Chatbot Howdy Released in 2015, Howdy is the first commercially available bot add-on for slack. It automates common office tasks, reviews progress, follows-up for progress, etc. It can also be trained to ask certain questions from the team members. The news is – Microsoft is acquiring Howdy. | Insurance Chatbot Hitee It is the world’s first insurance specific chatbot. It has defined workflows to segment the user intent through micro-conversations. Hitee understands industry-specific jargon. It is further equipped with machine learning models to get trained based on real chat data. | Conversational Therapy Chatbot Wysa It is a stress, sleep, and mindfulness therapy chatbot for emotional support. Apart from an empathetic conversation, Wysa is tracks mood and helps in reframes thoughts through its AI capabilities. It also supports appointment with a professional in instances of critical conversations. | Legal Chatbot DoNotPay Addressing the challenge that people are not usually aware of the rules and regulations that govern their everyday life, DoNotPay is a robot that brings the legal implications on fingertips. It helps users to appeal parking tickets in several cities, cancel a service/subscription, jump through any company’s support phone queue, schedule appointments, and sue anyone in small claims court. | Travel Chatbot Hipmunk Hipmunk is a travel chatbot that solves user’s travel-related queries. According to Adam Goldstein, CEO of Hipmunk – people run about 20 searches on average while planning a trip. Hipmunk understands users’ preferences and offers filtered travel suggestions, thus helping them save time in vacation planning. | Customer Service Chatbot Ada It is a live agent bot. Through simple drag and drop, users can train this bot to handle different messaging channels. According to Techvibes, Ada can automate more than 70% of customer interactions. What are your thoughts about these bots? I would be glad to expand the list. Do let me know about the remarkable chatbots of the century.
