Remember the first iteration of QR codes? Their adoption was slow and painful. You had to download a QR code reader. Then you pointed your camera at the QR code and it usually took you to a website formatted for desktop, so you couldn’t make out any of the tiny print and generally abandoned the futile mission.
Then came the pandemic and, all of a sudden, you had to scan a QR code just to see the menu! That’s QR code 2.0 – mission critical – where QR code 1.0 was just a bother.
It’s the same thing today with chatbots. The first iterations, over the past several years, existed as a dreaded icon on your favorite ecommerce websites, and you knew they weren’t there to serve you, but instead were there to help the merchant automate at your expense.
That was chatbot 1.0, but now it seems we’ve entered the era of chatbot 2.0. According to an article in Retail Brew, “the scripted bots of just a few years ago are out, and there’s a new robot in town.” These new bots us a branch of AI called Natural Language Processing, or NLP, and they’re much more capable of pulling off a natural conversation.
