Chatbots, which are often called virtual agents or virtual assistants, are used in place of a human to conduct specific tasks or provide information based on written or spoken requests. This functionality includes both external, customer-facing requests and internal, employee-facing requests. Chatbots allow users to interact with an application in a conversational manner, whether textually or audibly, to perform certain functions.

Although chatbots frequently utilize some degree of natural language processing (NLP) or speech recognition to understand written and spoken requests, they primarily function with the help of scripted conversations, which is in contradistinction to intelligent virtual assistants which utilize natural language understanding (NLU) to conduct human-like conversations. Businesses can leverage chatbot technology to automate tasks that formerly required human intervention. Based on a request from a user, the chatbot provides the user with an output, which is a response to the request in text or speech form.

Customer support tools, such as live chat software, help desk software, or contact center software, may already have chatbots implemented as a first line of defense when dealing with customers. However, they are becoming more widely used in other applications, such as sales and marketing knowledge bases. Users may even use them instead of a query language to find certain data points in business intelligence software; by simply typing or speaking a request to a business intelligence platform, a chatbot can provide the proper data. Chatbot capabilities are constantly expanding and becoming more frequently implemented in other types of software.

To qualify for inclusion in the Chatbots category, a product must:

• Provide an output based on the initial request in written or speech form
• Allow for the automation of formerly human-necessary tasks
• Be sold as a standalone chatbot solution, and not simply contain NLP or speech recognition within a conversational interface