Do you ever feel helpless with your study chores? It seems that the task is rather simple, but you don’t know where to start. The easy way is to start looking for online academic helpers and checking this essay pro reviews to figure out whether the service fits your needs or not. There, you may get access to all the materials necessary for your assignment or have the whole thing written for you.
But what if you’re not ready to delegate your duties to someone else completely? You just need some assistance with the task. And that’s where virtual assistants come in handy.
Yet, to be fair, even if you decide to delegate the task completely to professional essay writers from essay hub, you may need a virtual assistant for that. Some academic paper writing services have obtuse websites, and no customer support can help you. You won’t be able to use a service like that without a bot that will guide you through all the steps.
But what is a chatbot or virtual assistant? Are they the same thing?
Well, not exactly. While chatbots and AI virtual assistants have distinct primary tasks, and they differ greatly in technological sophistication, they can be used interchangeably.
The main difference is that even AI-driven chatbots are designed for basic and short communication with users. Virtual assistants, on the other hand, can engage in more complex conversations with users.
- Save time
- Enhance productivity
- Reduce costs
Those are the main benefits that chatbots and virtual assistants can bring you. They allow companies to improve customer service, although they still cannot completely replace humans.
Now, let’s check out the main AI bot types and their advantages and drawbacks.
Click Bots or Rule-Based ChatBots
Click bots are still the most widely used ones. They are based on the predetermined paths. Imagine browsing through a website of some shop or service. You can trigger the bot, and it will provide you with a set of questions that you, as a customer, might be interested in. When you choose this or that question, the bot will provide you with the pre-designed answer.
The popularity of this type of bot can be easily explained by their inexpensiveness and the fact that they are easily designed and quickly implemented. Despite being the simplest type, they continue to face improvements. For example, nowadays, they can work not only with texts but with other media formats, like video and audio files.
The only downside of the click bots is that despite their new ability to work with multiple media formats, they are still based on a predetermined path of conversation. Thus, you, as a user, are limited to a pre-designed set of questions. Whenever you need to ask something else, you won’t get an answer without human customer support interference.
AI ChatBot
If you aim for a more personalized conversation, AI chatbot is the type you’re looking for. These bots are capable of understanding what you need based on your requests. They don’t rely on predetermined conversation paths. And you’d be surprised, but you’re basically interacting with them all the time without noticing.
No, we’re not trying to induce paranoia. Thanks to AI, social media networks and streaming platforms learn which content to suggest to you.
Basically, the main benefit of AI chatbots is that they are capable of self-learning. But, hey, suggesting particular artists or videos based on preferences on Spotify and YouTube is still not the same as communicating directly with you.
So, how do AI chatbots understand you and provide the answer based on your unique, rather than predetermined, questions? They are capable of that thanks to NLP and ML.
Natural language processing, or NLP, allows the chatbots to understand human speech in a written or spoken form. They recognize particular, let’s say, keywords that allow them to react in a corresponding way. Machine learning, or ML, enables the bots to recognize data patterns. This allows them to engage in meaningful conversations with users.
Are there any downsides to AI chatbots? Well, they are not as widely used as their rule-based counterparts.
Previously, their use was limited to giant corporations, but nowadays, medium-sized businesses have started implementing them. Business-wise, they require constant updating and training. When it comes to communication with customers, they are almost perfect, yet they still can misunderstand your request from time to time.
Voice Bots
Voice bots can be simple rule-based chatbots as well as complex AI-driven virtual assistants. The main point of voice bots is that they recognize verbal requests and reply verbally as well.
An example of a rule-based chatbot is the voice that suggests which number you should press for this or that option when you call, say, a hospital. However, there are more advanced examples, like Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortana.
To be fair, your requesting something from the above-mentioned characters is not exactly a meaningful conversation. Some people would prefer to communicate with human specialists simply because Siri or Cortana lack empathy. In other words, if you want to hold meaningful conversations with voice bots, we are still not there.
If you want to know when communicating with bots on different topics will be possible, you should follow Sophia the Robot. Her communication depends on the AI-powered voice bot software. Speaking about the disadvantages of voice bots, if you have seen some of Sophia’s interviews, you may know that they can get off-topic from time to time.
Final Thoughts
Chatbots and virtual assistants are no longer a thing of science fiction. They are here, and they are being utilized right now. However, we are still, most likely, decades away from them being used in every aspect of our lives.
Maybe one day, you’ll communicate with a shrink bot instead of an actual therapist. As of now, you can stick to click bots and Siri and watch interviews with Sophia the Robot, who may get off the topic but doesn’t seem to cause as much damage as, say, Proteus from “Demon Seed.”