For the writer Hualde (2015, p. 7) is very emphatic stating, “Automated machines will not replace workers, but will perform complementary tasks.” For Idoia Salazar (2018, p. 296) “robots and artificial intelligence will help in the automation and improvement of many of the manual processes we do today” and the communication field will not be unnoticed and we believe that it will also be part of this worldwide trend.

6.4 Chatbots

Chatbots are technological resources used in a variety of fields: communication of organizations (sales, business, electronic commerce), education, banking services, entertainment, services, and technological systems/equipment, media, and others. Defined by Herrero-Diz and Varona-Aramburu (2018, p. 743) as “a program that interacts with users using natural language to simulate a human conversation”.

For Shawar and Atwell (2007, pp. 29–30) a Chatbot system is a software program that interacts with users informally, using natural language when trying to simulate a human conversation. There are different terms to refer to a Chatbot such as: machine conversation systems, virtual agents (virtual agents), dialogue systems (dialogue systems) and chatterbot (chatterbots).

At the discretion of Letheren and Charmaine (2017), Chatbots are artificially intelligent pieces of software, capable of having a conversation with a human. Up to now, there is no perfect Chatbot, but they are being perfected more and more, being able to do countless tasks, such as helping you schedule certain personal activities, attending online queries in various institutions and endless actions. These conversational agents that use natural language have increased their use in recent years due to the increase in technological personal devices. This is the case of Mika, Alexa, Siri and many more that are used for a variety of personal activities.

According to Shawar and Atwell (2007, p. 35), the initial objective of building Chatbot systems was to imitate human conversation and entertain users. For Weizenbaum (1966, 1967), cited in (Shawar & Atwell, 2007, p. 35) the first Chatbot built was Eliza, created in the 60s by Joseph Weizenbaum to imitate a psychotherapist in clinical treatment.

The idea is based on Eliza’s understanding of the keywords that came to her and accordingly, responding to move forward in the conversation and if she didn’t, she would recover a previous comment and return to the conversation, all using previously established protocols and rules. For example, if the entry includes the keyword “mother,” ELIZA can answer, “Tell me more about your family.” This rule is inspired by the theory that the mother and family are fundamental to psychological problems, so a therapist should encourage the patient to talk about family; but the ELIZA program does not really “understand” this psychological strategy, it simply fits the keyword and regurgitates a standard response. To maintain the conversation, ELIZA has to produce answers that encourage the patient to reflect and inspect, and this is done mechanically using some fixed phrases if there are not (Shawar & Atwell, 2007, p. 35).

In expressions of Shawar and Atwell (2007, p. 45), Chatbot should be created to generate new tools that help people, facilitate their work and improve interaction with computers, but not replace the human role and Perfectly imitate human conversation. Parallel to this, Colby (1999, p. 6) states: