Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed ELIZA back in 1962. Although the term ‘Chatterbot’ was coined in the year 1994 by Verbot creator Michael Mauldin, ELIZA is considered by many the first chatbot.


Today, chatbots are part of virtual assistants such as Google Assistant, Microsoft Cortana, and Apple Siri, making inroads to enterprise apps, websites, and on instant messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger.

1. Industries

Chatbots are also used for recreational and research purposes and are quite capable: they not only can understand natural language but are also befitting to reply in it, often making a conversing human believe they are talking to another human.

2. How capable are chatbots?

Mainstream Chatbots although are not yet capable to replace a human, they can act like one whenever required to. There are many instances at chat support desks when representatives are too busy (with other customers) to attend an incoming stream of customers.

A similar situation can occur at a sales desk, when too many website visitors want to know a lot about your products and services and are sending far too many queries in the chat box.

3. The Problem

Grieving customers seeking support if made to wait will only add to their frustration, they will resort to bad reviews and ratings even when you have solved their problem and will be harder to retain when the time comes.


Website users who wants to learn more about your product and services will lack patience and will abandon the website in a few seconds if the sales rep is sluggish.

4. Solving the problem

A chatbot in the above two situations can save a customer or two (or potential customer) by chatting with them when a human representative is unavailable, which will buy them enough time during the busy hours.

This can be achieved by various means, you can, in the backend, bake answers to the questions customers in distress often ask, and interface it with Natural Language Processing Toolkit to develop a chatbot app that understands and replies natural language in a way an untrained eye can’t tell the difference.

5. Chatbot development at Peerbits

FiveOH is a Messenger (Facebook) bot with whom one can communicate with provided they have access to Messenger regardless of the device they are on.

The bot has all the functionality of a food discovery and ordering platform and is equivalent to mobile app development. Ordering food with FiveOH bot isn’t much different from chatting with delivery manager at a food joint. On top of that, a user doesn’t have to download yet another just for the sake of placing an order.