Many websites now offer customers the opportunity to chat with a customer support representative while they’re browsing—but not every site actually has a live person on the other end of the line. In many cases, you’re talking to a rudimentary AI. Many of these chat support bots amount to little more than automated responders, but some of them are actually able to extract knowledge from the website and present it to customers when they ask for it.
Perhaps most interestingly, these chat bots need to be adept at understanding natural language, which is a rather difficult proposition; the way in which customers talk and the way in which computers talk is very different, and teaching a machine to translate between the two isn’t easy. But with rapid advances in natural language processing (NLP), these bots are getting better all the time.