Can You Build a ChatBot Without Artificial Intelligence?

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?

What is a Chatbot?

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.

Difference between an Intelligent and Non-Intelligent Chatbot

What’s an intelligent bot?

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’s build a non-intelligent chatbot.

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.

Import random

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)

Conclusion

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.