The new trend seems to be Artificial-Intelligence powered chatbots. In an interesting experiment, a university professor replaced one of his assistants by such a chatbot. The students did not detect it and actually wanted to nominate it as the best assistant in the class! (see ‘Innovations
What happened when a professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant‘)
While we are probably still miles away from a chatbot that can emulate a real speaking conversation, instant messaging chatbots seem to exist quite successfully in a number of instances. This removes clerical work for sure and we need to get used to it. In all instances more complex requests need to be handled by humans who are unburdened by the menial requests.Actually it would be interesting to have a test or some kind of identification that would enable us to determine if we are interacting with a chatbot or a human. But we need to be aware that it will be increasingly the rule that our interface will be with robots. In 5 year time it might even be the majority of the customer service we will be facing. For sure that will produce sometimes astonishing results.
