Statista says the chatbot market will surpass $1.25 billion by 2025. So, every business is keen on having a chatbot of their own. But building an intelligent bot is not a simple task. But then, does every organization need an intelligent bot? Or can they do it with a non-intelligent one?
Wait. Can you build a bot without artificial intelligence?
A chatbot is a computer program that seeks to simulate human conversations. They can either be text or voice-based. With increasing consumer demand for a better user experience, companies will hit the ceiling if opting only for the conventional methods of communication. That’s where a chatbot program comes in.
Without a significant increase in resource deployment, the service rendered is improved multi-fold with these kilobyte-sized computer programs.
Any chatbot that uses an AI program and Natural language processing behind the scenes to generate conversations is called an intelligent bot. There’s no need to pre-program answers as these programs learn with experience. Sophisticated bots make it virtually impossible to tell them apart from a human being.
On the other hand, the non-intelligent bots do not use any state-of-art machine learning algorithm. Instead, they use pre-programmed if-else conditional statements that generate answers fed into them by a programmer.
Technologically, these are a predecessor of intelligent chatbots and are easier to build.
Let us try to create a chatbot that is a non-intelligent chatbot using Python 3.
Building a non-AI-based bot requires extensive usage of if-else conditional statements.
Here’s a chatbot that tells you its name and randomly tells you about a scientist if you mention the keyword ‘scientist’ in your statement.
scientists= [‘Einstein’s my favourite.’, ‘Newton did a commendable job in classical physics.’, ‘Galileo and gravitation, too many G’s in there.’] Def getReply(message): if ‘who’ in message and ‘you’ in message: reply = “Hello human. I am Mr. bot.” elif ‘scientist’ in message: reply = random.choice(scientists) else: reply= “You use really complicated words.” While (‘end’ not in message): print(“ Type ‘end’ to end this conversation human. Now ask whatever you want to.”) message= input(“You: “) getReply(message)
Given that we have programmed a non-intelligent chatbot in this article, the answer to the question we first asked in the intro is a yes. Yes, we can build chatbots that do not use AI.
However, they are inferior to their intelligent counterparts in terms of usage. On the positive side, they are much more resource-efficient if used in simple use-case scenarios.