Botpersona or dumb bots ?
Hi
I read with pleasure, thanks; I think bot and chatbot are in facts synonyms.
Maybe myself I prefer to use the term chatbot when a complex natural language interaction is a prevalent feature (the software interact just in natural language, via text or voice), whereas I use the concise term bot, meaning a software application running on a instant messenger chat app like Messenger, by example, where a textual dialog flow is not the predominant media (let’s think a “well done” Messenger bots, with webpage-like UI with photos/carousels/widgets/etc.)
Many people still use the ridiculous terms virtual/conversational agent meaning what you name chatbot.
Myself I call botpersona all these chatbots like Mitsuku, or all Wilcoxs’ characters (e.g. Rose, Susette, etc. and btw I’m a huge fan of ChatScript) or Pullstring characters (Humani, HelloBarbie, etc.). And of course Microsoft stuff like Tay (…), but for sure Xiaoice; I mean complex authoring chatbots (incidentally, often hand-crafted by human authors/screen players/novelists) able to entertain users in long conversations, fooling users to interact with a person (remember the “I,robot” movie holograma scenes?)
BTW incidentally all mentioned bots are historically in entertainment realms;, but in my modest opinion great botpersona could be killer applications in business realms too.
On the other side, i distinguish botpersona from more simple business-bots for what you call business processes automation (Indeed I call these workflow-based or transactional bots). Maybe Ted Livengston (KIk CEO) could call them #noAI bots ;-). In this case, the bot are just the messaging way (chat app alternative alternative to the web paradigma) to achieve a business goal, following a maybe quickest interaction with poor NLP. BTW, I’m working on a tool to build this kind of dumb bots:
Last but not least, another fully abused term is Artificial Intelligence. Arghhh :-) but this is another big misunderstanding and another story
respect
giorgio