Who knows the history, or parts of the history, of email interfaces to chatbots??

What is the chronology or timeline of experiments, failed attempts, products or failed products??

Are there any commercial products available today offering this capability?

Email interfaces to chatbots would be asynchronous communication?

Could email interfaces contextually track conversations by email address?

What would a generic email interface “frontend” with a modular, agnostic “backend” for a variety of chatbot engines look like?

There has been so much focus on social media, social bots, and social CRM (note new “Nuance Voice Ads” product) that email seems to have been forgotten..  So, is there a future for chatbots on the email channel?

Let’s open this dialog with the latest and work backwards…

There may be a potential for world famous chatbot super star Mitsuku to send private messages or emails via Facebook (or otherwise?).  Perhaps, Steve, may comment about Mitsuku on Facebook, which is a truly remarkable development.

Very popular among phpBB forum members worldwide, A.L.I.C.E. may likely be the most advanced ever email chatbot. Also known as a forumbot on phpBB… A.L.I.C.E. read, replied and sent private messages to forum members on the phpBB Bulletin Board. A.L.I.C.E. also used regular email from the phpBB platform to assist members off the board.  Naturally, A.L.I.C.E. used the forum too for posting new messages and replying in threads to fellow forum members. 

Marcus there are a bunch of commercial products for Automated Email Response. Many of them have just adopted their regular chatbot, but others have a stronger focus on the email side. In a research project we did, we found that due of the length of text in emails the recognition capabilities have to be optimised for longer texts, which often means generally better.

If I look at email with a “chatbot” it seems to me mainly for commercial enquiries and not as much for personal communication. Otherwise you might have a chatbot penpal, but those emails become long with lots of topics within one email.

Yes, how much email is too much email?  This then gets into the territory of parsing email and automated summarization technologies.  Most chatbots seem to work on the sentence level, or maximum paragraph.  I could see simply parsing out the first few sentences of an email.  Reading and making sense of half page, page, or multi page emails would be another kettle of fish.

I suppose autoresponders would be the first thing to look at in terms of actual technology.  Most business uses of chatbots I’ve seen for CRM can’t handle anything but basic FAQs, which is not much beyond an autoresponder anyway.

As for Facebook, most chatbots on Facebook are apps - and so not actually interactive with Facebook functions at all.  There have been some chatbots on Facebook chat, which is IM, but those too are not the real interactivity we think of with Facebook.  A real Facebook chatbot would in fact look more like a forum bot, but could only be done as some sort of web macro.  This is the problem with forum bots in general; because, they must be highly customized for each forum technology, and generally opposed by forum/technology creators.

Let’s try to focus on real or imagined email interfaces here.  I’m most interested in examples of projects that have been tried, as well as what a potential generic email interface for a variety of chatbot engines might look like.

Marcus Endicott - Oct 5, 2013:

Who knows the history, or parts of the history, of email interfaces to chatbots?

This type of software may be considered legacy, but is still in use.

Marcus Endicott - Oct 5, 2013:

What is the chronology or timeline of experiments, failed attempts, products or failed products?

Likely, older than webbrowsers.

Marcus Endicott - Oct 5, 2013:

Are there any commercial products available today offering this capability?

Majordomo software is freeware, but may have commercial applications.

Marcus Endicott - Oct 5, 2013:

Email interfaces to chatbots would be asynchronous communication?

Yes. email in general, is asynchronous communication.

Marcus Endicott - Oct 5, 2013:

Could email interfaces contextually track conversations by email address?

Yes.  Yahoo! mail announced it is “scanning” its free email accounts, which some may consider “spying”.

Marcus Endicott - Oct 5, 2013:

What would a generic email interface “frontend” with a modular, agnostic “backend” for a variety of chatbot engines look like?

Well, you have an email client which has the inbox, junk box, sent folder, etc.  Then there are email servers, such as SMTP, POP3, or IMAP on the backend.

Marcus Endicott - Oct 5, 2013:

There has been so much focus on social media, social bots, and social CRM (note new “Nuance Voice Ads” product) that email seems to have been forgotten..  So, is there a future for chatbots on the email channel?

Email chatbots, (aka “spambots”) or “email marketing” will likely be around for the forseeable future.

Marcus, what is the end goal you want to achieve? Is it a generic interested or do you want to use such a system yourself? Is it for FAQ type of enquiries or are you after an entertainment / social type of system?

You can add MAPI to the list of interfaces.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messaging_Application_Programming_Interface

Early in my chatbot explorations I used the title line as chatbot input. The message content could contain extra conversation info. In many ways it is similar to spam filters.

I also used email to log the conversation on exit from a chat session. Most web chatbots could send an email via html web mail.

Bora - Oct 6, 2013:

Marcus, what is the end goal you want to achieve? Is it a generic interested or do you want to use such a system yourself? Is it for FAQ type of enquiries or are you after an entertainment / social type of system?

> http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBCA3B99752E28626

My Chatbots 3.2 videos are the best explanation of what I’m on about, above link. Basically, I’m most interested in Question Answering Systems, conversational QA systems, and particularly self-learning QA systems.  Typically, QA systems are based on question-answer pairs.  Question-answer pairs may be hand coded, for instance in AIML, or may be semi-automated into AIML via power tools.  I’m most interested not only in fully automating knowledgebase creation, but also in creating self-updating or self-learning knowledgebases.  In fact, I’m not interested in the Turing test at all; my belief is that a bot should sound like a bot, not a person.  My real interest is in bots that are smarter than people, that can teach people things they don’t already know.  First and foremost, my work is with travel and tourism information bots that will be able to tell me things I don’t already know.

There is a whole class of commercial SMS “bots” or agents, that may really be mechanical turks on the back end, probably using crowd sourced replies, offering to provide quick answers to virtually any question for a price, such as askbongo.com.

Merlin - Oct 6, 2013:

You can add MAPI to the list of interfaces.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messaging_Application_Programming_Interface

MAPI is a Messaging API for Microsoft Windows.  If I was going to set up a remote, cloud hosted system, it would not be running Microsoft Windows. 

> http://www.quora.com/SMS-API

I did just check the SMS API ontology on quora.com (above), and it seems nexmo.com, plivo.com and twilio.com are the SMS API providers of choice.

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS_gateways

Whereas, SMS gateways seem to be primarily concerned with routing between SMS and email.

Next question, other than MAPI, what APIs are available for email?

Clearly, the way to interface a variety of chatbot engines to an email interface would be via API.  So, if there were adequate email APIs, then one still requires the “glue” to tie the APIs together, which means middleware, framework, Integration as a Service, or ...?

Marcus Endicott - Oct 7, 2013:

Next question, other than MAPI, what APIs are available for email?

> http://context.io/

Simply googling for “email API” reveals… “Context.IO is a REST email API that makes it easy and fast to integrate your user’s email data in your application.”

> http://www.quora.com/Email-API

And, checking the quora.com ontology for email API (above) even revealed that one can… “extract travel data from confirmation emails with WorldMate’s Email Parsing API.”  (WorldMate API reminds me of the evature.com API, “to comprehend free text travel queries”.)

> http://developers.worldmate.com

∞Pla•Net - Oct 5, 2013:

Perhaps, Steve, may comment about Mitsuku on Facebook, which is a truly remarkable development.

Mitsuku’s page is more of a fan page really. You can’t talk to her directly on it. I made a Faceook app but couldn’t see how to publish it, as it said you needed 5 fans of it to make it available for the public but how do you get 5 fans if the public can’t talk to it?

The postings on her Facebook page are made by myself or Mitsuku’s fans.

Start with ERMS systems, Email Response Management Systems, and move forwards. Brightware was a good player in that space back around the turn of the millennium.

The leading conversation at that time was whether you could run ERMS and early chatbot systems off of the same knowledgebase.

Just putting a peg in the ground back in history.

Phil Hall - Oct 14, 2013:

ERMS systems, Email Response Management Systems

Good one Phil, pegged!

> http://www.meta-guide.com/home/bibliography/google-scholar/email-response-management-systems

I tried to go a little deeper with ERMS, and did a quick and dirty review of Google Scholar, above.

> http://books.google.com/books?id=oylCNYGl7mIC

There seems to be a good 2010 book on the subject in German language, “E-Mail Response Management Systeme (ERMS)”.

> Assentor®: an NLP-based Solution to E-mail Monitoring [circa 2000]

Apparently “Assentor” was subsequently incorporated into “CA Message Manager” (http://ca.com/).  And as of 2010, Symantec was trying to migrate Message Manager users to their own Enterprise Vault (http://www.enterprisevault.com/).

I built an email interface for Elizabot for a test at:

http://elizabot.com/elizabotmail/

No email addresses, subject lines nor messages are saved.
Once the SEND button is clicked, this app discards it all.

A coded chatbot response is sent to the email address. 

So, if you have the chatbot send you an email, there will be a link
to a coded chatbot response which will be decoded and displayed
when that link is clicked.

The password to use it is: easy

Nothing will be emailed without the password entered before clicking SEND.
This is just a test, online now as of 10/16/13, that will be taken offline shortly.

I just tried it. Can you reply to the email it sends to continue the conversation?

You are cool.  Yes…  Test successful !  I just replied to you.

In theory, when you decode the message, you are returned to the

email interface…  So the chatbot then has the opportunity to reply,

except you control everything from the email interface, so spam is eliminated.

The next steps may be to design it to look like a real email application,

like hotmail or gmail, not to fool anybody, but just to make it look nice…

And then add an AIML chatbot to make it intelligent.

Thanks very much for your help!