Chatbot

July 15, 2019
|By Lukas Volz

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A chatbot is a computer program designed to conduct conversations with people via digital channels and automatically answer inquiries. The term is a combination of the English word “chat” and “bot,” short for “robot.” Chatbots are integrated into websites, messaging services, or other digital interfaces and often process user input using artificial intelligence.

Differences from conventional bots

In computer science, the term “bot” generally refers to a program that runs autonomously, performing its tasks without human intervention and requiring only a single initial setup. Bots can serve various purposes, including malicious ones, such as in the context of botnets, which enable coordinated denial-of-service attacks.

A chatbot is a specialized form of this concept. It is explicitly designed for communication with humans and is geared toward processing conversations in natural language and providing meaningful responses. The key difference lies in its ability to interact: While general-purpose bots perform tasks in the background, a chatbot is designed for direct interaction with users.

The Role of Artificial Intelligence

The processing of natural language input is only possible through the use of artificial intelligence. Human language does not follow rigid rules and cannot be processed directly using traditional programming logic. Instead, Natural Language Processing , or NLP for short. In this process, a user’s input is interpreted by so-called large language models to identify the underlying intent.

Once an intent is recognized, it is converted into an action. This action can be a direct response to a question or the execution of a process, such as retrieving information from a connected system. For a chatbot to provide meaningful responses, the NLP component must be backed by a structured knowledge base containing answers and defined actions.

Applications and Channel Integration

Chatbots are used across a wide range of text-based channels. In customer service, they are often set up as web chats on a company’s website or integrated into social media platforms such as Facebook Messenger or Instagram. They can also be integrated into HR workflows via Slack or Microsoft Teams. 

Various platforms are available for developing and operating chatbots. Providers such as Google (with Dialogflow), IBM (with Watson), and Microsoft (with LUIS) offer their systems as publicly accessible web services. These platforms provide access to sophisticated machine learning systemswithout the need to build your own infrastructure.

BOTfriends offers a high-performance enterprise platform that allows you to build intelligent chatbots in-house and manage them centrally across all channels. Thanks to its intuitive no-code architecture, you can automate complex customer interactions all the way to the backend without relying on expensive external integrators.

A chatbot processes text-based inputs and provides text-based responses. A voicebot, on the other hand, is designed for spoken language and also uses speech recognition and speech synthesis technologies. In practice, both types can be based on the same conversational logic and differ only in their input and output modalities. BOTfriends X supports both variants within a single platform.

Not necessarily. There are rule-based chatbots that rely on fixed decision trees and predefined response paths without using AI components. These are suitable for simple, clearly structured use cases. However, as soon as natural language inputs in variable forms need to be processed, the use of NLP—and thus AI methods—is necessary to ensure reliable recognition of user intent.

Chatbots are used in a variety of fields, such as customer service to answer frequently asked questions, internal IT support, recruitment, and e-commerce. They are deployed in situations where there is a high volume of similar inquiries and automated processing is beneficial. They are integrated through channels such as web chat, WhatsApp, Microsoft Teams, or other messaging platforms.

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