Читать книгу Enterprise AI For Dummies - Zachary Jarvinen - Страница 50

In 2001, AOL launched SmarterChild, a chatbot that could report the weather, do calculations and conversions, set reminders, store notes, and answer general questions that you would use a search engine or a virtual assistant for today.

Chatbots, also called chatterbots, are text-based applications or plugins that replace the human side of a conversation with artificial intelligence. Chatbots are frequently used on websites to provide tier-one technical support, schedule appointments, find a specific product, and other simple tasks that can be accomplished without human intervention. Early implementations had a limited ability to parse language and thus required the user to formulate a question with a very specific syntax and vocabulary. Deep learning based on intent recognition has expanded the utility of chatbots by freeing the user to ask questions in everyday language.

Unlike virtual assistants such as Siri, closed-domain chatbots are trained as experts in a specific field and can resolve a large volume of questions and requests simultaneously and continuously, tying into a customer relationship management platform and allowing call center employees to focus on more nuanced issues.

While many of these examples could be typified as business-to-consumer applications, AI began making inroads into enterprise and medical environments as early as the 1970s. Many of these applications use supervised learning, unsupervised learning, or a combination of both.