But Facebook’s chatbots might get very smart very soon. On Wednesday, Facebook unveiled DeepText, a natural language-learning network engine to help its chatbots and other software better understand and mimic human language by scanning “several thousand posts per second” by Facebook’s global users.

http://www.newsweek.com/finally-there-facebook-chatbot-actually-works-466387                                                  What the story is describing is a virtual assistant not a true chatbot. Chatbots by their nature and the nature of written language are hard to program. Many well known experts have been trying various types of natural language engines to make them more intelligent in their conversation. Language evolves and written language is especially problematic as many use abbreviation and misspell words. They are going to attempt to solve this by observing conversations. So all I have to say to facebook is good luck. I am going to be on the side lines laughing when it falls on its face just like microsoft’s chatbot did.

Additional note: many programmers have tried to use the mimic method and it never works. You have to be able to go into it and correct the errors. There is no way to get around that fact.

Chatbots are similar to virtual assistants but they are not exactly the same. Chatbots are usually more generalized and just conversational programs. The definition of a chatbot is :

“a chatter robot is a type of conversational agent, a computer program designed to simulate an intelligent conversation with one or more human users via auditory or textual methods.”

  From the Chatbot-wikepedia

A virtual assistant is more specialized and designed to answer questions based on user input. It normally can not carry on a conversation beyond what it is programmed to answer in regards to the type of assistant designed.  The diffention of a virtual assistant is :

“An intelligent personal assistant (or simply IPA) is a software agent that can perform tasks or services for an individual. These tasks or services are based on user input, location awareness, and the ability to access information from a variety of online source”

From the Intelligent personal assistant-wikipedia