I am aware of many fantastic chatbots in the public sphere, such as Amazon Alexa or Apple’s Siri, but I haven’t spent as much time with any of them as I have Cleverbot. The first AI chatbot I had interacted with, Cleverbot piqued my 10-year old interest to the max. I’d spend hours typing into its input box, waiting for its reply. Every so often, it would respond with a totally off-topic response due to some error or due to its programmed efforts to change the topic when things got dull. What made this experience memorable is that this bot kept track of human language syntax from its users responses, and over time, used them in its own responses. This affords a human-like conversation which is influenced by modern trends in digital language, which translates in its user’s mind as being relatable.
One idea that I can’t recall seeing before is a Chatbot that resides on a user-created buying/selling site such as Craigslist or eBay. This Chatbot would tell potential buyers of a product if there are any other offers on the site that are more cost-effective, and tell potential sellers how much the item they are selling are going for. When buying and selling items on these websites, I find myself searching for longer than expected for cost-effective products as well as competitive sellers, so I believe that a Chatbot that does that for its user will be effective.
