Reference: cmswire.com - Student Share By: X. Cameron (USC - https://www.usc.edu)

The underlying tech is similar but chatbot use cases and how they are classified is expanding rapidly.
The Point: Why This Article Matters
Where we are. Most chatbots today can answer simple questions accurately about the weather, what’s on TV or return an account balance, but more complex questions elude them — with ChatGPT now the big exception.
Where we're going. Over the years, chatbots have evolved and advanced to become more humanlike and sophisticated, with some capable of performing tasks such as writing computer code and composing music — with no end in sight.
Even though the conversational chatbot ChatGPT is all the rage right now, many people will probably be surprised to learn that chatbots have actually been around since the 1960s when ELIZA was unveiled by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT. Chatbots have come a long way since then.

Perhaps the most recognizable chatbot is Apple’s Siri, but chatbots can be found almost anywhere that people and machines interact today.

“Chatbot itself is a bit of a catchall, because it's a really handy term because there's two components of any chatbot, there's the language processing and action taking, or there's the chat bit, and there's the bot bit,” said Will McKeon-White, an infrastructure and operations analyst at Forrester.

While there are accuracy, veracity and copyright issues with the latest generation of generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT, ChatSonic, Jasper Chat and others, they are garnering a lot of attention because these chatbots answer questions in much the same way a human would — only much, much faster. They can also write simple computer code, create art, compose music, and generate marketing content and essays that rival what humans can do.


“One of the biggest barriers for this technology has been in respect to earning the trust of the user,” said Natarajan Venkatesan, director of intelligent automation for NTT DATA. “Earning trust comes with two other important factors, security and privacy. Striking the right balance between security, privacy and trust has been critical, and ChatGPT has broken this barrier.”

Related Article: 6 Ways ChatGPT May Change Digital Customer Experience

Understanding the Different Types of Chatbots
While the underlying technologies that make chatbots function — decision trees, natural language processing (NLP), natural language generation (NLG), text and voice user interfaces (UIs) and the like — are all similar, the way these technologies are combined and deployed as well as the use-case for which they are being used all factor into each chatbot’s identity, said Rosaria Silipo, head of data science evangelism at KNIME, a data science platform provider.

“The variety of chatbots around at the moment differs depending on the domain, i.e., the use case, the more or less advanced technology in the background, and the UI, for example voice based, text based or even button based,” she said. “But, frankly, I think they are all a variation of the basic chatbot structure.”

In fact, after searching online and asking three experts, the best and most succinct response to this question came from ChatGPT itself. (To ensure accuracy, ChatGPT’s answers were cross-referenced with blogs from Spiceworks, the startup MessengerPeople, the chatbot company HelpCrunch and others.)