Way back in April 2016, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that third parties could use the Facebook messenger platform to create their own personal chatbot. This got everyone in the world talking about this artificially intelligent technology and ways to use it to leverage their business. Marketers were delighted since, besides back-end operations, chatbots could now go on the front end and handle the company’s brand by providing seamless and real-time conversational experiences to clients online.
But the game did not go as planned for Facebook as the hype died out a bit and social media chatbots started disappearing. Seemed like social media marketers were not able to figure out how they could use this amazing new technology. But at the time, several technology companies took the bots idea seriously and started developing these programs that used not just artificial intelligence but other advanced technologies like machine learning, natural language processing, and natural language understanding. This meant that the bots were now becoming self-learning virtual assistants. Almost every business with a virtual presence today has already installed or is seriously considering having a virtual assistant deployed on their site for pre-sales or sales service, customer support, and several other reasons.
