AI stands for Artificial Intelligence that is usually defined as the science of making computers do things that generally require human intelligence. A bot or “chatbot“, short for chat robot simulates human conversation, or chat, through artificial intelligence.
A bot is a software that can respond back to user inputs, relying upon the input keywords. All such scenarios are only possible when there is some artificial intelligence in a software system that can prompt relevant business units when an event occurs.
So, AI can enable you to interact with a chatbot by using interface, and avail services ranging from everyday practical tasks to entertainment.
AI Bots: A Few Facts
- There is a lot of talk about AI ( Artificial Intelligence), Machine Learning and Bots, and what effect they could have on companies. Let’s take a crash course on these important topics and separate the “hype from fact“.
- AI (Artificial Intelligence) is usually defined as the science of making computers do things that generally require human intelligence. AI has some success in limited or simplified domains.
- Machine learning is a type of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that provides computers with the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. Machine learning focuses on the development of computer programs that can change when exposed to new data.
- A bot or “chatbot”, short for chat robot, is a computer program that simulates human conversation, or chat, through artificial intelligence.
Types Of Bots
Bots increase their disruptive potential if they provide value in several ways but without confusing Users we are representing the categories. Each one represents a hypothesis on how the use of the messaging canvas could disrupt traditional offerings. A lot of people are betting their hats on these implicit assumptions.
IM And IRC
Some bots communicate with other users of internet-based services, via instant messaging (IM), Internet Relay Chat (IRC), or another web interface such as Facebook Bots and Twitterbots. These chatterbots allow people to ask questions in plain English and then formulate a proper response. These bots can often handle many tasks, including reporting weather, zip code information, sports scores, converting currency or other units, etc others are used to entertainment, such as SmarterChild and AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger.
Social Bots
A type of bot on a social media network used to automatically generate messages, advocate ideas, act as a follower of users. It is estimated that 9 – 15% of Twitter accounts may be social bots.
Twitter bots are a well-known example of how fake social media accounts influence popular culture, politics and can create convincing online personas capable of influencing real people. Social bots are very similar to spambots in how they can infiltrate groups of people and be used to propagate specific ideas since social media bots can produce messages automatically.
Commercial Bots
Commercial bots: When bots mean business. The majority of traffic visits your website with various types of threats – hacking, account takeovers and content theft among them but they can also hide unexpected business opportunities.
A large category of bots can potentially be transformed into paying customers. This whitepaper from DataDome reveals how you can protect your users, infrastructure and your business, and generate new revenue with the same tool.
Malicious bots
A malicious use of bots is the coordination and operation of an automated attack on network computers, such as a Distributed Denial of Services (DDoS) attack by a botnet. Internet bots can also be used to commit click fraud and more recently have seen usage around MMORPG games as computer game bots.
A spambot is an internet bot that attempts to spam a large amount of content on the internet, usually adding advertising links. More than 94% of websites have experienced a bot attack.
Helpful Bots
Companies and customers can benefit from internet bots. Internet bots are allowing customers to communicate with companies without having to communicate with a person. Dutch Airlines has produced a chatbot that allows customers to receive boarding passes, check-in reminders, and other information that is needed for a flight company to have made chatbots have been developed.
Chatbots are used on a daily basis. Google Assistant and Siri are considered forms of chatbots. Google Assistant and Siri allow people to ask questions and get a response using the AI system. These advanced technologies are positively benefitting people’s daily lives.
Why AI Bots Are Important For Business?
Bots and machines are getting smarter day by day and can automate fairly boring and repetitive tasks. As bots get smarter the tasks can become increasingly more difficult and the bots will learn to do harder and more complex work.
A good example of this is letter sorting in the post office. For many years letters were sorted by hand, but computers developed and were used to ‘read’ the writing on letters, making it thousand of times faster to process mail. There are many similar innovations that we take for granted today.
- If you have ever used Siri or Google Voice on your phone, then that is the result of hundreds of hours of programming allowing a computer to understand human speech and behavior, giving you back the most relevant answer.
- Have you ever wondered how Amazon can ‘predict’ what you want to buy when you go shopping online? They are using a complicated AI recommendation engine.
- Have you had your card blocked when you go abroad? Visa and MasterCard use AI to recognize patterns out of the ordinary and try to detect when there is a break in the normal pattern.
Bots- “That Are Running on The Internet”
The internet is not run by humans, but by robots. According to research, bots account for 52% of all web traffic. The survey, which took into account almost 17 billion website visits ranging over roughly 100,000 domains, concluded that the bots have officially taken over the internet. So what exactly are the most prominent helper bots out there and what do they do?
1-Web Crawlers or Spiders
Also known as spider bots, these friendly and hardworking bots relentlessly roam the web for our convenience. Whenever a user turns to a search engine employs. For example, Google relies on its very own crawler software, known as Googlebot. What these spiders do is browse web pages and index them, so that search engines can know what is in them and return accurate results to user queries.
Search engines typically have numerous spiders at large simultaneously, Crawling from one page to another and fetching content, so that they can generate a lot of feedback at the same time that will inform their ranking of websites in the search results they yield. What they do with the information they receive is to build a large searchable index database, listing the words they encounter according to the respective algorithm. For example, when Googlebot crawls a specific website, it both looks for all significant words and take note of where on a page the words were found.
2- Web Scraping Crawlers
These bots are essentially crawlers, but they are used for a fundamentally different function. Instead of helping with indexing, web crawlers in these cases assist in data scraping or data harvesting, which includes fetching content throw crawling, adding it to a database, and then later extracting relevant bits of information for analysis. Although this process may sound a bit straightforward, it is actually extremely complicated and IT professionals are constantly developing new techniques and uses for data scraping. Web scraping software can be manipulated to look for specific content in specific places within a website, according to the purposes and goals of the developer who employs it.
And the uses of data scrapping are countless: most importantly, it can be used to compare things, like product features, product reviews or pics fluctuations- so it is very helpful for a lot of consumer-oriented software and apps. It can also be used in weather monitoring, compiling a list of contact details from different websites, building “trending topics” lists and so on. In that respect, web scrapping bots can be useful to a wide range of people, from web developers to academic researchers to advertising professionals. Most importantly, even less tech-savvy users benefit from the use of crawlers, even if they don’t employee them personally, as much of the information they consume online has been gathered through them.
3- Text-reading algorithm
Bots produce perhaps the most amazing results when they are employed to execute tasks that the human brain can accomplish too- but the speed, the volume and the accuracy of the bot is no match for its human counterpart. This is precisely the case with text-reading bots- elaborated algorithms that can browse text and analyze it according to specific keywords and their frequency within the text. Text-reading bots are for example employed to filter comments in social media or online news outlets, in order to flag and exclude specific types of comments.
Sometimes, the text-reading algorithm are taken one step further. Google Translate is such example, a user can point out their smartphone or tablet camera at foreign language text, and then get a translation of it on their screen. This approach combines OCR, text reading and translation algorithms to create meaningful output for the user. Algorithms and bots can be programmed to perform certain actions if they find a specific string of text in the text they read and this approach gets more sophisticated with time. One development sees traders use trading use robots which are programmed to make transactions depending on variations in keywords in specific news and market reports or even on lack of specific keywords.
4- Chatbots
Chatbots, also known as chatterbots or talkbots, are among the “good” bots out there, that are the most recognizable by regular users- simply because they can realize when they interact with them. Chatbots are algorithms programmed to simulate a human interlocutor in order to conduct a conversation with their capabilities tailored to the specific type of conversation for which they are employed. In that sense, chatbots normally pass the Turing test.
Nowadays, Chatbot technology is widely used in virtual assistant software, which is on the rise and expected to evolve even more in the next few years. Think Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri. Some specialized chatbots can take it to the next level, such as DONotPay- which is described as a “robot lawyer”.
5- Video Game Bots
The Internet is not only about information and transactions. It is about entertainment, too, This last type of bots is all about helping with having fun and making sure that games can get the best experience possible but they are also slightly misunderstood. Game bots are AI software algorithms that can interact with a video game and take the place of a human player.
Although they have lately developed a bad reputation as they often abused by gamers in massively multiplayer online role-playing games to outsource boring, repetitive tasks such as “farming” or to accumulate experience without the player actually earning it, games bots are vital for the gaming experience when they are used as intended.
Just a few decades ago, when the internet came into existence, little could we imagine the size and versatility the world wide web would develop in such a short period of time, the internet nowadays can feel like an abyss that is impossible to navigate and this is precisely why AI bots are developed. Possessing the capacity to process information in a speed impossible for the human brain, these programmed algorithms now form an integral part of any surfing experience.
