Robotics and artificial intelligence, chat-bots and neural networks are technologies that have been trendy in recent years. The explosion of the popularity of this topic in all sectors shows that people themselves let the robots into their lives. Numerous projects, startups, technological parties are actively helping in this.

History of chat-bots

“Bot” (short for “robot”) is a program that simulates human activity. Chat-bot, respectively, imitates the interlocutor in the chat. The first experiments on the creation of such programs began half a century ago. One of the successful examples of communicating with the machine is the illusion of human communication – Eliza, written in 1966, a chat-bot, imitating (or rather parodying) a dialogue with a psychotherapist.

Once in the most popular ICQ messenger, there were dozens of bots that performed the function of a joke collector, translator, calculator, bot that sent a weather forecast, currency exchange rates, news, movie poster, etc. on request or schedule. To solve elementary problems, the user did not even need to leave the messenger and open the browser.

The modernity of chat-bots

Today chat-bots replace the support services of all kinds of services everywhere.

We are used to perceiving robots as machines. Although a modern robot is not always a machine, it is a program that can think for you and help you. In fact, such programs have been around us for a long time – in our smartphones and tablets, computers, in offices and in the kitchen, in a store and a bank.

The chat-bot is developed on the basis of machine learning technologies and neural networks. The chat-bot is created and trained for a certain range of purposes by man and for man.

The main feature of this program is the active participation of a person at all stages of its development. The spread and use of chat-bots led to the UX-paradigm of the interaction “messaging-as-an-interface”. It is in instant messengers, whose audience is only growing in the world, that chat bots have found a fertile environment for development.

Technology leaders – Facebook, Google, Apple, are already actively investing in the development and implementation of chat bots.

Types of chat-bots

Actually chat-bot

This is a trained interlocutor program, of which we have already talked. Their functions and tasks, under which they are written, are extensive. Some of them:

– Consultants – are used in the commercial sphere for communicating with potential and real clients, bots in the banking, service and online shops are already running. For example, in Russia it is the company “Nanosemantika”, it introduces its bots in banks, telecom and medicine.

– Assistants – used in instant messengers and search engines. So, the company “Yandex” already has its projects of bots-assistants, as well as Telegram. Or the project of Russian businessman Mikhail Melanin “Statsbot”. This bot provides data analytics (Google Analytics and other services) at the request of users. Also, he is able to independently monitor the resource analytics and notify about changes;

– Entertainment – are used on entertainment portals and services. It is interesting that bots are created for children. What is also quite promising in terms of gaming learning. For example, the bot “Talking Angela”. It is an application where a cute cat answers questions. If you turn on the camera phone, begins to express emotions facial expressions and gestures. In the subsequent series of the children’s bot, other heroes were used.

Game bot

A program that performs some processes in the game. For example, in strategies pumping the character online RPG, automates the game in an online casino. Popular simple game bots are now popular in Telegram – MyPokerBot or Car Racing Bot.

Exchange bot

This type of bot sets the algorithm and tactics of working with the exchange. Bot does everything himself and his reaction to market changes is immediate.

Reference: more than half of transactions with shares in trading on the stock exchange in the US is realized with the help of robots.

Web bot

These bots are not used with good intentions. They copy content, collect data, hack accounts. And all for what? In order to then you send out letters called “spam”.

Search bot

Search bots are work for SEO specialists. These bots collect almost 30% of the Internet traffic of the whole world.

Their function: index pages of sites, and they exist for the work of search engines.

Botnet (network)

This is an illegal, hacker field of application of bots.

Botnet – several bots (usually a large number), connected together and forming a network of computers, under the remote control of intruders. This is due to spam mailing, transitions to questionable links, as a consequence – computers “grasp” the virus, connecting it to the network.

The number of infected machines in botnet networks around the world is impressive – about 500 million.

As you can see, bots are capable of carrying both benefit and harm. And this is another problem of technology development, when technologies are used not for good, but for evil.

The close future of bots

However, the bots, experiencing a second birth and a wave of popularity, yet while making wise slow. There is still a lot of development and improvements in this area, so that bots become a real technology tool and justify the experts’ forecasts.

So, the well-known case with the bot on the Twitter network only confirmed that the system can self-learn “in the wrong direction”. For example, become aggressive or intolerant.

Chat-bots: what’s next?

Now chat-bots are conquering the Internet world and messengers. According to analysts, the indicators of active messenger users exceed social network performance.

The life of modern man is so active that social networks do not keep up with her in speed and instant. Therefore, modern people transfer communication to instant messengers – instant messaging services.

Certainly, people have a really breakthrough technology in their hands. It is able to change both life, and production, and labor of people. It can create a new look for many spheres of business, facilitate and automate the processes of large-scale production and management.

But first of all we need a clear system of regulation of this technology – legislative acts, standards, standards and certification. That is, some points, the rules for which will be created and run bots.

Otherwise, how to know whether the frames from the film “The Rise of Machines” will become a reality for people.