Institute For The Future

bots and chatbots

 

As part of IFTF research on futures of persuasion, we might consider the role of non human intelligence persuaders:

 

 

Chatbots are conversational programs that mimic human intelligence and are sometimes animated. Chatbots are a sub genre of 'bots'(short for robots) applied to both 'good' (search engine web spiders and crawlers) and 'bad' (malware and spam zombie servers)

 

Bots, according to wikipedia are'

 

 

 

"Internet bots, also known as web robots, WWW robots or simply bots, are software applications that run automated tasks over the Internet. Typically, bots perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone." en.wikipedia.org

/wiki/Internet_bot

 

 

 

and chatbots are,

 

 

"...designed to simulate an intelligent conversation with one or more human users via auditory or textual methods. Traditionally, the aim of such simulation has been to fool the user into thinking that the program's output has been produced by a human (the Turing test)." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatterbot

 

 

If you are interested in chatbots you can check out this somewhat eerie directory list of a few user created chatbots here at the AI Foundation website,

 

 

www.alicebot.org/directory.html

 

or this rather impressive list of user created chatbots (525) at

 

 

 

www.chatbots.org