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THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF DIGITAL MARKETING 370 ecosystem’developed by combining intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) and text-based agents with wider borders. This led to a definition of chatbots as autonomous agents with abilities to understand and hold naturalsounding conversations with users (Sheehan et al., 2020; Smutny and Schreiberova, 2020). The chatbot was introduced by Mauldin (1994), who combined ‘chatter’and ‘robot’to describe this new technology. Chatbots, also known as talkbots, chatterbots, bots and intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs), are continuing to expand their conversational skills through their competence in natural language processing (NLP)(Følstad et al., 2018b). NLP refers to chatbots’ ability to recognise, evaluate and react to a human conversation (Dale, 2016).