Examples include Microsoft’s Tay, Facebook’s M and Amazon’s Polly.
COVID-19 was a game-changer for chatbots. However, prior to the pandemic, around 2016, there was a short-lived chatbot hype, with lots of big players launching bots within a short space of time. Examples include Microsoft’s Tay, Facebook’s M and Amazon’s Polly. These, and plenty of others were relatively fleeting, due to the amount of human assistance required for set up and maintenance, and the fact that many chatbots couldn’t understand enough human language or process enough data to complete the complex requests companies promised.