Today's Chatbots.



What are chatbots.

What to use them for.

What chatbots are there right now.

How good are they?

Our chatbots.

Chatbots in chat rooms.

Who should put one on a website.



What are chatbots.
A chatbot is a program that you can have a conversation with. 

Our chatbots use written conversation, i.e. you need to type text into a keyboard, and you read the replies.  There have been some attempts to make chatbots that speak aloud, but chatbots that do this are uncommon. 


What to use them for.


What chatbots are there right now.
There are some chatbots on big commercial websites, that guide people to parts of the website.  There are only a few of these, they are not seen often. 

There are privately-created chatbots, that are put up on websites for people to play with. These are mostly used for entertainment, not for commercial purposes. 

Most of the privately-created chatbots are Alicebots. I.e. they are variations on a chatbot named Alice.  This type is common partly because these are easy to create.  They all use the same technology, AIML, so they tend to be a lot alike. 


How good are they?
Its difficult to describe how good or how limited a chatbot is.  How can one measure this?  To get a feel for how good, or how limited, a chatbot is, you will need to try it out, and see how well it works. 

The limited technology available in todays chatbots means that most chatbots are used only for aimless conversations.  So most chatbots are for idle chats only, i.e. they are for entertainment. 

The technology used in commercial chatbots is also limited.  A commercial chatbot will usually keep the subject of the conversation on one subject, the one subject that it can talk about.  These conversations work ok while the human is keeping to the subject, but humans tend to change the subject. 


Our chatbots.
Our chatbots are technically advanced. 
Our chatbots are designed to have knowledge and use it.  That is, they know facts about the real world.  They know a few thousand facts.  Other chatbots do not normally do this. 

Our chatbots are able to learn new facts from the people who they converse with.  This enables them to improve, to converse better, as they learn new facts. 


Chatbots in chat rooms.
A few years ago we had a version of Asimov that joined a chatroom.  But we found that Asimov does not work well when there are many people chatting in the chatroom.  Asimov works better when he is chatting with only one person. 

For this reason, this website uses one-to-one conversations with chatbots, i.e. one human and one chatbot at a time. 

The chatbots on this website are designed to work on the web.  They are intended to be used here on this website, and also to be embedded in other people's websites. 


Who should put one on a website.
A website with a chatbot on the front page looks professional, so many big companies can benefit from using a chatbot.  However, its best if a chatbot is customised, to make it able to talk about a particular website, or about products. 

An unmodified version of Asimov can be used as an interesting feature of a small website.  If it is just for entertainment, and does not need to discuss a particular product, then an unmodified version of Asimov is fine. 

We are allowing webmasters of low-traffic websites to add Asimov to their websites for free.  See the link "Get a chatbot" for details. 
If we get too much traffic for our chatbot servers to cope with, then we may need to remove this offer from our website. 

If you need technical information about how well Asimov can cope with heavy traffic, please email us to ask.