Vic,

With all due respect, I disagree that bots will never replace live operators. The problem as I see with the current Chatbot approach is that developers are making the whole process and structure way more complicated than it really needs to be. A Chatbot does not need to understand the meaning of every word in a user’s query to respond with a relevant and intelligent response. The important factor is understanding context and each bot deployment requires a different context knowledge base. As humans, we generally filter out most of the non essential words and focus on subject nouns that are relevant to the conversation. The more we converse, the less need there is to prequalify the context unless the topic is changed. It really is not rocket science when it comes to simple AI driven chatbots. The challege is actually in higher reasoning which most chatbot applications do not require.

* Off the soapbox now *

Laura Patterson - Feb 15, 2012:

... I disagree that bots will never replace live operators.

OK, it’s safer NEVER to say NEVER

A BusinessWeek article mentioned some scientists believe a possible end of human world is being taken over by an AI entity and AI has more chances to destroy human world than atomic bombs.  That’s scary but hasn’t stopped me from working on our bots.

Without a higher level of intelligence, the bots would not be able to take over the world. However I believe bots can work for people even they are unable to “understand” the “true” meaning of human words, based on the improved weak AI techniques. From this view angle, I totally agree your points.