What’s a conversion? It’s a communication between two intelligent entities!
Unfortunately Human and computers don’t talk the same language leading to evolution of point and click interfaces(yeah GUI in short). But seamless communication is still elusive and humans are forced to learn newer ways to converse with computers.
Over the years the GUI have become more and more adapted to human way communication. User observational studies led to introduction of Gesture based interfacing with computers and other devices. This kind of interfacing is more natural and more realistic but still one would need to associate & remember a host of gestures to interface with a device.
Conversational Interface (CI) as a concept has been around for a long time. But the concept gained prominence at advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The combination of CI & AI gave rise to infinite possibilities from e-commerce chat to a vision of building a truly unified application catering to all user needs.
There are many versions of Chatbots in use currently.
The First kind is rule based bots which are based on standard rules written behind the scenes. These bots typically allow only pre-determined set of answers and questions
The problem with these bots is it’s not truly conversational and are very restricted in nature.
The Second Kind is rule based bots with NLP. Natural Language Processing makes it possible to have a normal conversation with the bot instead of selecting predefined options. The bots recognizes the keywords from your query and replies back.
Example :
John : Can you get me a large pizza from Joe’s
get = order / buy
large = size
Joe’s = joe pizza place, #31, NJ-07080
Well the problem is learning, computers are very fast at computing known patterns but extremely slow at learning new patterns. The operator will end up hand-holding every time a user’s writes a slightly different query.
YO! get me a large one from joe’s
I want a large double cheese from joe’s
and so on…
So where does it leave the CI. Well! That’s where AI comes in. Artificial Intelligence backed by Machine Learning will overcome all these issues and hopefully humans will be able to shot back at their computers instead of the poor IT guy when something goes wrong.
