Customer Service

Traditionally customer support was provided by humans working in what are known as "call centres". Customers would call these support teams and get their questions answered and issues resolved. Human support requires a large investment in people and infrastructure, especially if the support is required 24x7.

Today, AI/ML based systems, known as chatbots are widely used for customer support. A chatbot is used to conduct an online conversation via text or speech with a human, instead of with another human. The better the chatbot design and capability, the more likely it will be able to convincingly simulate the way a human would behave as a conversational partner.

Customers can access chatbots over the Internet from their computing devices and ask questions or report issues. This solution has the ability to respond to almost an unilmited number of customers immediately, unlikely with a human support system where depending on the number of calls, customers may have to wait in queue for a long time.

Even as they are improving in their capabilities, virtual assistants do have the limitation that they can only respond to a fixed set of standard queries and are not able to address extraordinary queries.

Chatbots are used in systems for various purposes including customer service, request routing, or information gathering. While some chatbot applications use extensive word-classification processes, natural-language processors, and sophisticated AI, others simply scan for general keywords and generate responses using common phrases obtained from a pre-populated database.

The Turing Test

Originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1950, it is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Turing proposed that a human evaluator would judge natural language conversations between a human and a machine designed to generate human-like responses. The evaluator would be aware that one of the two partners in conversation was a machine, and all participants would be separated from one another. The conversation would be limited to a text-only channel, such as a computer keyboard and screen, so the result would not depend on the machine's ability to render words as speech. If the evaluator could not reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine would be said to have passed the test. The test results would not depend on the machine's ability to give correct answers to questions, only on how closely its answers resembled those a human would give.