Chatbots have become popular in the last few years, and are used by many businesses to help customers to perform routine tasks through the web. Social media and messenger platforms have added to the growth of chatbots more than anything. Recently, Facebook messenger hit 100,000 bots on its messenger platform. Along with chatbots, voicebots are also gaining a lot of traction nowadays, and Alexa by Amazon is a prime example of a voicebot. Chatbots have now penetrated deep into customer markets so that the customer gets a prompt reply and doesn't have to wait for information. With time, the evolution of machine learning has evolved chatbots from being simply conversational to action-oriented, where they can now help customers book appointments, get product details, and even take user's inputs, bookings and reservations, and orders online. The healthcare industry is seeing that the use of chatbots can help with ever-growing number of patients.

You can also understand the importance and expected growth of chatbots, as many of the heads of big companies have heavily invested in chatbots or bought chatbot-based companies. You can name any giant organization—say, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, or IBM—all are active in providing chatbot platforms and APIs. We have all used Siri, or Google Assistant, or Alexa, which are nothing but bots.

The following diagram shows the landscape of chatbots in 2017:

The concentric circles, starting from the inner circle, show platforms, brands, providers, and tools.

In this chapter, we will be looking at different types of chatbots, and we will be developing a simple appointment-booking chatbot too.

The following topics are going to be covered in this chapter:

• Chatbot architecture
• Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity