Geez I guess no one bothered asking users if THEY like chatbots? IMO chatbots are the online equivalent of getting an automated response from a phone line. like calling CVS pharmacy "press one" for pharmacy, etc... You get the point of it, but it's basically a tool that only benefits businesses because the user experience is very poor. I wonder why no one tries to make this whole bot thing have more of a personality? It seems so bland. If they modeled it after ONE person instead of using "data" to sound neutral, they would be more successful.
Chatbots are great if they assist me with quick actions, like viewing my order/shipping status, and when it's obvious that I'm "talking" to a bot. What gets annoying are chatbots that start with "how can I help you?" and attempt to use natural language processing on my reply to guesstimate a response. More often than not I end up frustrated, wishing there was an 'Operator' button that I can use to talk with a real person. It's way easier and more comforting to be talking to a real person behind the business when I need something.
It's distressing that more and more chatbots are spawned every day to take the human element out of customer support or when engaging with a business. Chatbots work when they're a complement to human customer support, but when they're up front and center they tend to be distracting, frustrating, and their attempts to act human often amuses me. I do like Kik's and Messenger's approach to a bot and I think they are on the right path.
Well as everyone knows, ordinary users find CLIs easjer to use than GUIs!
I am only half joking. The reason nerds like CLIs is that they can just tell the computer what to do without having to first coax it into offering the appropriate menu.
The same is true for non-nerds, except they no one really wants to learn the exact commands. If for some reason, clicky-window GUIs had not been invented in the '80s -- then the hot thing in UI research might have been fuzzy, english-like text interfaces, including online help.
That is basically what is being re-discovered via chatbot technology.
I think this is a good point. There is a lot of time spent in finding things nowadays. A small example: Was helping my wife (doing it myself) with updating her direct deposit information at her employer. I used their search, the first link has a page with a non-working section that doesn't work (tried two browsers), the second page didn't work, the third page is a general page which has a section with a working link. I use that link to go to a page with mostly whatever I need. Except it needs a branch code. Which we don't exactly know. Then it has some other confusing text which we don't know applies to us.
So while I am skeptical, I am starting to understand the value of a chatbot and possibly a single way to do things. Maybe the "easy" path via the chatbot and if someone is a real poweruser they can use the window and type all information themselves.
Because you don't have to coax CLI to do what you want?
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One's inability to read the API documentation isn't the API's fault. If I address an English-speaking person in Spanish, I probably wouldn't get very far either.
It actually turns out that some non-technical people are more capable of navigating a conversation with a chatbot than the average website. Basically it solves the problem of finding your own information vs the chatbot finding the information for you.
For example: we had a bot that could take care of HR, expense, and IT issues. So instead of having to look in one of the systems or the documents on SharePoint, you could just ask: "how many days of PTO do I have left?" Or "when will my last expense report be paid?" or "can I get email on my corporate phone?", and the bot would be able to handle it. Especially in larger companies with lots of systems finding that can be difficult.
HN is probably not the intended audience for chatbots :)
Personally, I hate talking to random humans (I have friends, if I want to talk to someone). The only reason I ever do so, in the case bots are intended to serve, is if the company's website can't do what I want. Give me a good website that provides all of the stuff I might need to do when interacting with your company, and I will never ever ask to speak to a human.
I've always felt like bots for use in customer service were trying to solve a problem by adding more problems. So, now, not only is someone talking at your company because they have a problem that couldn't easily be solved by your web presence, now you're making them navigate an uncanny valley of dumb questions and answers...following the same old support script only now with even less intelligence and autonomy on the part of the company rep.
I chatted with a Verizon representative the other day, only because their website does not support discontinuation of service to a device. I tried calling and got a long wait and when a "How can I help you?" message popped up I gave it a shot. Worked well, got my problem solved very quickly, not a huge fan though.
Totally. The problem is that a lot of "AI" discourse makes the automatic assumption that humans want to interact with quote-unquote "machines". Humans want better user experience and humans do a good job interacting with other humans:). What's missing in the ai-bot conversation is the spark of creativity. There is the assumption that "AI" alone will create value, when value creation happens when user experience is new and exciting.
I am doing something like that myself as a side project, not exactly as "AI" more as voice interface responding to voice commands that uses humor and character voices to reply. In way, the problem of bots is actually "AI".
You can create a more flexible and lively experience if you put "AI" aside and really think of how people interact and create responses that are not based on "mean" values, but on real conversations. You don't even need the whole AI backend, you can just use javascript, audio files with or without accompanying text. Because so much of the conversation is bland, having a "voice" will make a huge difference.
AI developers should consider collaborating with writers and comedians:)
Chatbots in China over WeChat act as a lightweight Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system, which is highly successful due to a set of market factors which are (at least from my perspective) unique to China.
But, as I've been saying for about a year now, chatbots, in their current incarnation, don't make a lot of sense outside that niche.
Looking at it from either the American or Japanese perspective, there are a set of expected standards for customer support, which are either already met via web-based mostly-automated systems (Amazon is really good here), or by being able to directly chat with a human being (perhaps supplemented by AI) to solve a very specific and usually uncommon need.
Replacing that setup with nothing but a text-based IVR system is a non-starter for any company that wants to remain in business.
>Geez I guess no one bothered asking users if THEY like chatbots?
I think there's definitely two distinct types of people in this regard. Just like automated responses from phone lines, I much, much, much, much prefer "speaking" to a robot that:
a) is often less stressful than speaking to a human
b) is often able of hearing and understanding me better than a human
c) is often more easy to understand than a human
d) is often more straightforward to get help from
e) is often "happier" to help
f) is often much faster to interact with, especially in repeated tasks like paying bills, authorizing payments, etc
And if you do need to speak to a human after all, they typically treat you better knowing you've already gone through the "easy stuff" and are seeking something extra.
I'll regularly put off or completely avoid calling any companies (support, bills, etc) that don't have automated processes, and will just take my business elsewhere at the first opportunity.
I wholeheartedly wish every line I had to call were automated, and extending the real-time support capabilities of online communication only makes quality support more ubiquitous and easier to get, IMO.
--
I spent an hour on the phone with UPS support this morning (first their 1800 number, then their Reykjavik office, then one driver, then another driver, then the Reykjavik office again) that could have avoided a ton of back and forth and miscommunication if I'd just spoken to a bot in the first place that could take my request ("Hi, your online tracking says a package could not be delivered to my address because 'I moved', when in fact I did not. Please deliver it anyway.") and put it directly into a database available to the office/drivers.
Just you wait. Chat-bots are currently at the level of a text-based adventure game combined with an arcade game, i.e. a primitive interface designed to minimize the player's (customer's) chance of winning (reaching a knowledgeable human). Just wait till they're fully gamified with a modern interface and an f2p revenue model.
Not yet, but it's only a matter of time. Imagine every company's support being a version of Stack Overflow where you get points for answering other customers' questions (grinding), or by paying actual money, and can trade these points for time with knowledgeable, paid humans.
We tried this out years ago, the issue that we discovered was that humans are pretty good at working out when their efforts could be better directed at earning money rather than points.
People will work to support a community, because they gain self actualisation from helping others and getting status from others. Some more "karma" can be generated from early access programs and expert feedback status on new products. That's all though - there is not an endless well of good will out there to be exploited by social media and bot infrastructures. People like real gold!
Honestly that sounds horrible to me. I'd like to skip the whole point conversion and dealing with non-experts and just talk to a human that works at whatever company please.
Have you ever called support over phone and waited a long time for a simple question? Annoying, yes? A chatbot can often answer that simple question immediately. So yes, people do like chatbots as long they at least manage to get most of the simple questions right.
For example in our case, clients often have problems logging in. With our chatbot they can easily get a one time password sent to their phone. With a regular search/faq they would have never known about that, because they are often too frustrated with the UI experience for finding that information. With a natural language conversation, it is easier :-)
For a bank with many different ways to login, and a web application, mobile application and more, this isn't a simple task. There are many things that can go wrong. A well designed chatbot can troubleshoot the issue for a user step by step. If one of the paths fails or the problem is actually of a higher complexity, we just redirect the user to a real human.
Getting a regular non techinal user to search and read the documentation for this is just insane.
Forgot password, send password, change password, change contact info, check warranty status, estimate next release date, download product manual, how to replace the battery, does the license allow commercial use?, which product is better for an apartment?, I'm looking for more information about your upcoming event in Tulsa - or was it Toledo?
The problem is how best to expose those and 100,000 other potential buttons to the user who has better things to do than "navigate".
An obvious solution is a search box, but most sites also have terrible search functionality, so users have learned to ignore it. For the rare gem that has useful search, dressing it up as a chatbot could get people to actually try it. Too bad it looks like a lot of devs are just dressing up their shitty search as chatbots, so users are being trained to ignore them as well.
> IMO chatbots are the online equivalent of getting an automated response from a phone line
I agree, but that doesn't mean they're as bad as them.
It's _much_ faster to read a text and reply with a word/number/tap than it is to wait for the option you want to be read out to you: "for x press 1, for y press 2... for z press 9". Or worse, have to speak what you want, wait for it to parse what you said, and then ask you to confirm.
They're also superior (and less stressful) for a certain type of person - for example, my mother appears to be slowing down a bit, mentally, as she gets older, and a chat bot would be a lot easier for her to navigate over a phone menu, because she has time to read it and think about it without feeling pressured to key in a response before the phone menu times out. And she doesn't have to worry about forgetting what the phone menu said because, hey, it's all on screen.
Except, the phone tree isn't what's on the web. So really you're putting texting against a webpage or an app, which will always deliver a better ux because they're unconstrained.
There needs to be a right balance between bot and human. Personally, I think bots are a replacement for UI, not a replacement for real conversations. I want to use a bot when I activate a credit card for example. It's a glorified "activate" button in lieu of actual UI, but if I have fraud on my card, I want to talk to a human, because I want a conversation, not a substitute for a series of UI decisions. We're on track for developing an "assistant" bot of our own here at Reamaze. Our starting point for AI at Reamaze is a bot for assisting agents with responses, not customers.
I think companies are just beginning to learn how to do this in a way that benefits them and their customers (which is why I largely agree with the poor UX and blandness you're describing).
I work at a company that's helping businesses automate parts of their customer support with chatbots and you'd be surprised to learn that CSAT improves when they employ some automation. Usually this means getting a quicker first response to the customer's question (and some of the time successfully answering it!) as well as automating tedious data collection (what device are you on? what's your email? etc.).
It's early days for chatbots and I think we'll see a lot of improvement where automation through conversation should be and I think we'll also see the rest shake out.
More to your point: I agree with you, IVRs are usually really bad, but some of them are impressive. Have you used Apple's recently? It's very good at routing and making cases where it's uncertain invisible.
Can someone explain to me how chatbots are taught? Can you give them a 1000 slide product guide about, let's say, Intel 2016 SSDs, and then throw a question like: Can you use Intel SSD model X23Y with DELL server XYZ?
Have a look at Speakeasy for a bot that is trained on reddit using deep learning, it produces very plausible responses to queries but has a few weaknesses.
Firstly it's not task directed, so if you ask it about changing the oil in a car it doesn't know any useful facts and it doesn't present them - it just fobs you off.
Secondly, type "you're" into it - it will be very rude to you... because... reddit.
So what's needed is something that can read technical documents and use them at the right time in a conversation. Deepdive (http://deepdive.stanford.edu/) gives you a bit of this capability, but when I used it (version 0.4) I struggled, maybe things have improved! Non the less; I do believe that this is state of the art for machine reading.
IBM did a tonne of work on question answering in Watson but I am now so confused about Watson that I literally don't know what to make of where their work has got to.
Hope that helps, would be interested if there are different opinions out there!
On the other side too, many of the best chat bots are being built as essentially Expert Systems, rather than Deep Learning, and there's a lot of old research and ideas to dust off from that field. Right now a lot of the chat bot Expert Systems are ad hoc, from what I gather, and it will be interesting if there's a resurgence in exploring and modernizing a lot of the old ideas and classic systems.
As with the brief flurry of the Semantic Web era, I think the lesson with chat bot VI/AI will again be as much in striking the balance between things like Deep Learning and things like Expert Systems, assuming Deep Learning will never be perfect and Expert Systems will never be easy/cheap (building a good one still requires a domain expert in that field to train it in whatever rules engine you are using to express the domain).
Totally agree and there are some reasons to be optimistic about logic programming and the like - Bayesian systems like PRISM and answer set programming seem to me to be big steps forward since the last time we went round the block on this!
However I think that the cost of knowledge engineering is still massive and the challenge of this kind of project so sharp that it makes me quail to imagine execution! I think three or four years of full on tool development might make this more practical...
The developers of RPGs like Morrowind would be better suited at building chatbots than the companies currently trying, I think.
Much like the examples in this article, I haven't seen any bots that can present information in a way that is easier than a normal interface, or that even counts as "conversational."
Maybe I'm being an asshole when I say this, but it just doesn't feel like these chatbot companies have put in the sheer man-hours to work out conversations. They're feeding you the information they have, through a small number of prompts that they predetermine. 100% useless.
Where are the creators of Cleverbot? Shouldn't they be using their platform to capitalize on this? That was the most conversational bot I'd seen so far and it came out forever ago.
I saw a recent article try to claim that conversational UIs were just like GUIs -- there are a handful of buttons, that you need to shoehorn into verbal commands.
That's what many people are trying to do, and why they are such a maudlin medium so far. IMHO, most are trying to shoehorn their UI into chat for no good reason.
Conversational UIs are good for two things really - dealing with massively selection, and providing an interface for entirely naive users.
Ultimately, I see them as much an extension of search interfaces as they are of messenger apps, insofar as given a potentially open-ended number of buttons (like restaurants in your area) it's easier to ask for them in english, despite the fact that the interface has anticipate all the issues that brings (you might not get it right, your request may be ambiguous etc)
And, sometimes it's easier to use english to make a selection - particularly if you don't know how to do something that should be relatively simple, and is consequently relatively simple to describe in english ("Hotel room, turn on the lights." "I want to order a pizza."). Unfortunately, this takes both advanced natural language parsing, and equally advanced response generation. The later is much harder, and I feel generally neglected, by most chatbots and platforms, IMHO.
This makes a lot more sense when using voice rather than text, but ultimately, hybrid voice/gui chat displays are what chatbots are going to evolve to. You will ask for something via voice and in addition to receiving audio responses, you will receive a stream of UI widgets in a chat window containing supplemental information and finer grained controls, such as sliders for the color/brightness of your hotel room light, or an options menu for your pizza order.
Amazon Alexa and Google Now are already quietly doing this, for the most part, but it's going to become a much prominent part of the interaction over time.
I built a super simple system a while ago that simply kept up the conversation as long as it was 'on track', the first time it would deviate it would engage a human on the back-end and record the answer extending the track just a little bit further.
After a couple of months of training it it could keep up a conversation for a few minutes along most of the tracks that it had learned. To make it look more life-like I added random delays in answering and sometimes splitting an answer across two messages. Spelling errors were retained as well instead of being corrected.
Of course that's not a 'bot', merely a recorder and replay but it was at least as effective as long as the conversation was kept relatively short.
I think you're right that chatbots need to be way more conversational, but I don't think having every company re-implement Cleverbot would be beneficial. Certainly Siri does this, but that gets old after awhile, and it's annoying when siri thinks you're looking for a joke or something clever when you just want information. I think the parallel to real life is when you call customer support, or order food at Wendy's. The conversation is usually extremely railroaded towards one specific subject (though within that domain, you can dive deep, like "are the pickles super sour or are they more like fresh pickles" that chatbots can't do yet)
I definitely agree with you on this. I think somewhere in the middle-ground is perfect, obviously.
I think I should be able to ask your chatbot how their day is going, but I don't think I should be able to shitpost with it for 3 hours.
The reason I bring up Chatbot is because they seemed to at least have the conversational part figured out.
Also, Siri is really not such a part of this conversation because it is honestly the only chatbot that I can think of that accomplishes a portion of what we're talking about here.
Cortana's novelty functions are cute and make good advertising, but they're not really relevant to the quality of the service. In practice, you'll use them a couple of times, chuckle, and then never think about them again.
2 works for me on Google's voice assistant. Setting alarms, getting directions, and voice dialing also work well. Nothing too exciting. Mostly useful when you don't have hands/eyes or don't want to get up and reach your phone. "Clap on/clap off" lights type of thing.
How is Google VA with background noise. I will renew my phone soon and am between the Pixel and the iPhone 7 (but I hate the absence of the headphone jack and don't want an adapter)
An anecdote: is that recently I was in a noisy restaurant with an open kitchen (think loud steam blasts and fryers and servers yelling out order numbers) and showing an older friend how far voice recognition had come and it successfully got most of our queries first try and if not, every time second try. This is with English language and asking it to play specific songs. We also have something of a strong accent compared to the san-fran types that presumably trained it (northern England)
Nowadays all those companies are reinventing the wheel: They make virtual assistants like Siri, Cortana, and Google Assistant. But really, they all do relatively the same things. These companies are just creating applied AI mainly for marketing and commercial reasons.
That's not how we'll be able to achieve real AI soon.
I sincerely doubt a gaming company would bring anything to the table. Simply because, no one wants an phone tree, and that's what games provide.
The reason why 90% of chatbot companies aren't living up to the hype is because they're doing it wrong. Either it's an phone tree, or they're doing naive matching on regexps, or perhaps just throwing a bunch of data and trying to deep learn some intents. It's pretty amateurish. If you used more traditional NLP techniques, you'd get much further.
The other problem with chatbots is that people have become accustomed to general chatbots like Siri, and so even if you say, "my chatbot only does X", you're still going to have people trying all sorts if stuff that's not X. ("Hey, banking bot! What's the melting point of lead?" "I only do banking question." "You suck banking bot.")
I don't think this is true, I think you are just overestimating the abilities of even the most advanced chatbot technologies. You get presented with a traditional conversation interface and you are expecting the level of communication you would get with an actual person, but all current consumer chatbots (including Siri/Google Assistant/etc.) fall horribly short in offering a seamless, fluid conversation. The result is a really unpleasant experience made worse by high expectations.
I still think that the Jack Principles is one of the most useful UX documents in this arena and that it is a shame that it's gotten so hard to find.
Originally designed for and lessons from the game company formerly known as Jellyvision (the game company part of that is now spun off into Jackbox Games), the Jack Principles was a briefly free resource during the late part of the IRC chat bot golden age in the 90s.
The consulting firm that is left at Jellyvision still uses it as a part of their consulting, so they don't give copies away for free anymore. I'd love to see a new edition of the Jack Principles in textbook form, especially now that it is very relevant again.
>> Much like the examples in this article, I haven't seen any bots that can present information in a way that is easier than a normal interface...
Funny, I see the interface of bots on a messaging platform as their only value. As for the AI/NLP, Meh. To me the possibility of replacing the umpteen apps and Web pages with a single consistent UI is the appealing part.
What's the consistent interface of bots? You need to know their supported commands to get anything done. Until we have actual AI it will remain an obfuscated command line. Interfaces like Siri are convenient because they actually use AI/NLP!
In many ways this new generation of chatbot is worse than what we had 20 years ago in IRC -- at least then the functionality was clearly presented.
> Until we have actual AI it will remain an obfuscated command line
Well put, sir. I hadn't managed to put that into words quite as succinctly but you've pinpointed exactly my feelings and my reasons for skepticism.
Unless you bother to read up on the commands that it accepts you find yourself greeted 50% of the time with "I don't know how to do that". Now we're on the same turf as any good UX problem - power-users (who have the incentive to learn an interface) vs casual users (who don't and shouldn't have to). Chat bots seem to be targeting the latter but they require the time investment of the former.
Yeah, I was speaking from a slanted point of view because I'm not the typical user. What interests me about them is their potential to be a more powerful terminal command line. One that can render graphical responses as well as text.
I've grown very tired of all the differing UIS I must navigate on a daily basis.
> Until we have actual AI it will remain an obfuscated command line.
I've never met a command line that wasn't obfuscated. Try learning Unix using only man pages as reference. With bots, you can at least expect reasonable responses to some natural-language requests.
The examples given are just embarrassing. What weather service doesn't understand zip codes, or, y'know, the name of an entire US state?
Last year, I said:
"Chatbots are a fancy name for when your API is accessible through some well-known IM service.
They come with all of the monetization issues of APIs, but they're surfaced in an environment where you have no pre-existing relationship with the client, and you can't even charge them for access.
This essentially limits the business model to where you give away the chatbot and make money some other way; or you recognize you have no business model and do it anyway." [1]
The discoverability factor is amusing: apparently everyone complains about discoverability, just like they did with Apps and websites. First-comer Kik isn't big enough for advertisers, meanwhile, Facebook added bots just to have them and isn't doing anything to promote them because it realized it has all the users, and botmakers will give them business regardless.
The discoverability question always boils down to "how will people find my stuff, in favor of my competitor's stuff?", which just proves that the chatboot "boom" is just like the app boom and the website boom before it [2]: a gold rush to make it big early, then as the dust settles, the roster of victors will have emerged and they'll maintain those rankings for years. Others can still establish niches for themselves, but they are deluded if they think runaway success is a realistic goal.
All this means, as the article points out, that most of today's chatbots are just phone trees in text form -- which still has value, but is a lot less enticing as a get-quick-quick scheme.
As a owner of a bot building platform (https://www.botamp.com), it's very disappointing to read articles like this. All the hype around chatbots, the high expectations that will obviously never be met (at least not with current technology) are hurting adoption of these very useful tools.
Actually, for this very reason we don't even have the word "chatbot" on our homepage.
When people say things like "stay in contact with everyone who clicked on the ad to open a conversation with the bot", "Discovery is the biggest challenge", it shows that they just don't get it.
No customer, ever, will open their Messenger just to hold a conversation with your chatbot. Customers don't actually want to "discover" your bot so that they can chat with it. Why would they want that? They have more important things to do with their lives. :)
What customers want when they write to you on Messenger is finding information or performing a transaction. When you understand that, you can quickly see the benefit.
E.g. add a bot that will instantly reply to frequently asked questions to decrease the load of your customer support team. And when the bot doesn't understand requests, don't make it say "sorry I don't understand", just leave the question and a human will reply later (and maybe send a message with expected timeframe for human response).
When you have a chatbot which can replies to more than 30% of customer queries (for some of our users, we've seen bots reply to more than 90% of questions), it'll save plenty of money and time for your business.
About discoverability, well, how did your customers find your Facebook page in the past? Why do we need a special way to "discover" now? Maybe for "game and entertainment chatbots" a bot store would work, but I just don't see how it would work for serious businesses.
How can a business leverage bots right now?
- quick data collection
- instant answers to frequently asked questions
- surveys and polls over chat
- lead nurturing via Messenger (engagement rates > 70% compared to low read rate of email)
> E.g. add a bot that will instantly reply to frequently asked questions to decrease the load of your customer support team. And when the bot doesn't understand requests, don't make it say "sorry I don't understand", just leave the question and a human will reply later (and maybe send a message with expected timeframe for human response).
Why not just present your users with your FAQ and a search box prior to them chatting with an agent? If most customers write in to support on questions that they would've found answers to via an FAQ, wouldn't that work? You don't need a bot for that, and it's just more load on a customer to try and understand the interface to the bot.
I think bots are going to be big in customer support or in conversations between a customer and a business, but I feel like a lot of bots are being built to try and replace the human connection between customer and the business, which I think is the wrong approach.
> Why not just present your users with your FAQ and a search box prior to them chatting with an agent?
Because e.g. the user asked the question on Facebook Messenger. And you don't want to send them to your website when you can reply instantly, right there.
> You don't need a bot for that, and it's just more load on a customer to try and understand the interface to the bot.
I'm actually advocating for bots with no interface, no IRC-like commands. The customer sends the question via chat. If the bot understands it replies instantly, if not a support person replies. Simple. No "type X for whatever" or "sorry I didn't understand your request".
> I feel like a lot of bots are being built to try and replace the human connection between customer and the business, which I think is the wrong approach.
> Because e.g. the user asked the question on Facebook Messenger. And you don't want to send them to your website when you can reply instantly, right there.
You're defending the use of a bot for a scenario that only occurs because the bot exists.
No, please read the full thread. The scenario is the following:
There are currently hundreds of thousands of Facebook pages which receive dozens of customer support questions every day via Messenger.
My point is that a bot can be used reply instantly to frequently asked questions and leave more sophisticated questions to humans. I'm not defending any fancy use of bots. Just simple use cases like this.
One experience I had with a bank that was hard in the past was querying specific account information, specifically routing numbers. Either search would tell me where to look on a check (great let me go find those) or give a generic FAQ. A chat interface can provide that without having weird navigation to boot. To be fair the bank did fix that search recently so it shows me my actual routing numbers now.
Also I just spent 50 minutes in chat with either a bot (or possibly human named Anil) with Comcast trying to sort out a billing issue. Spent 20 minutes trying to point out the lines in the bill I was disputing though I got the credit but I'm not sure if they actually knew why they were giving it. I'm not sure if it would have been faster to call by phone (usually not) but I thought I'd try the chat interface. I wonder if a good bot might be able to figure out context and get a human involved and give them relevant context faster and sped that interaction up.
Look at Wikipedia definition of bot (or other definitions on the first page when searching Google) "Typically, bots perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone."
I think "instant answers to frequently asked questions and surveys and polls over chat" (with some NLP to make it better) surely match that definition, no?
I don't understand why everyone is so fixated on the AI/conversation aspect. :)
With the current state of the technology, companies can benefit by using bots to enhance human-to-human conversations, not trying to replace them altogether.
> companies can benefit by using bots to enhance human-to-human conversations, not trying to replace them altogether.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. Bots should be a complement to human conversations, not a replacement. Having a bot doesn't mean you hire less customer support agents, it just makes them more productive.
Often times, it really means you hire less since there's less support load. E.g. we have a customer which support requests are more than 90% frequently asked questions. Adding a bot to their Facebook page decreased their support load from full time to at most 1h a day. :)
But as you mentioned, when using a bot, the goal should be customer happiness, not cutting costs.
Your line of thinking here really resonates with me. I'm building services on top of two bots right now that fit into this transactional "I want to do X in as little time as possible" category and I think Messenger bots are a fantastic way to achieve that.
Making a chatbot is really hard, because you need a lot of data and it needs to be of good quality. You cannot use a random chat message log and train your model, it will usually have way too much noise. Instead I highly recommend that you build it from scratch. Then you will start getting great results. You also have to use a proper spell checking algorithm and understand the basics of how a full text search engine actually works and know the purpose of using stop words and synonyms.
I would love to present our virtual assistant "James" to the rest of the world, but we have only recently started to build english training data. Currently it only understands english with the use of synonyms, so it isn't working as well as it should.
If you're interested in trying it out you can play with it on the webpage of one of the largest banks in Norway http://srbank.no, the chat icon is at the bottom right. You can ask questions in English, but it will unfortunately only answer in Norwegian at this time, so you have to use google translate too see if it answered correctly. "James" do support language detection though, but we have just recently starting to add the english answers. In a few weeks and James will answer in English :-)
Currently James can predict over 1500 intents related to banking and insurance. Here are some of the more complex questions James can handle:
Want to open a savings account for my daughter
Can I adjust the limit on my sons bank card
What can you tell me about my pension
Do you have a pension calculator?
I was out drinking last night and lost my credit card
If anyone says that chatbots aren't working and will never work, I can say this with real data to back me up, it works very well! The feedback we have gotten the last few months has been amazing! And I'm 100% sure that chatbots will become a big industry the next years. Complex UI's will finally be good riddance.
Feel free to ask me anything if you have any questions.
Yes, all the data we use to train our model on, is handcrafted by our AI trainers. What they do is figure out all the different questions that are most common to ask for each intent we want to predict. We have built a tool that helps them creating all these sentences, often we use templates with keywords.
It is still under development, we started at the end of last summer. We use Torch and Python-NLTK.
Why have you chosen torch instead of staying completely in python? I assume that you use nltk for tagging, entity regoncition, ... and torch for your classifier.
What kind of model is possible in LUA-torch that could not be done in python with caffe/tensorflow?
The bot looks good. Have you tried AWS Lex? It has a pretty good English language model (same as Alexa) - you just add a bunch of example sentences per intent, and it does the matching
Actually no ;-) We do use Amazon Polly though, and Google's Speech to Text. Works very well with our chatbot, but none of our clients want stt and tts. Text is what they all want. Maybe later when both solutions become more reliable for nordic languages. English is very good though, on both sides.
I work for GYANT[0], and we're building a chatbot for doing medical triage, patient follow-up, and answering health questions. We're young (launching this Thursday actually), but it's already been pretty successful in a number of countries (like Brazil) with a few hundred thousand users with minimal marketing. My girlfriend was able to use it without issues to go from "my throat hurts" to visiting a doctor in 24 hours because she likely has tonsillitis. The interest and response from the medical, the pharmaceutical, and the insurance communities have been very positive and they're approaching us left and right to bring this out to more users.
Chatbots were probably overhyped and oversold to people. Not every platform needs to explode overnight and produce SV unicorns. I think there is immense value in chatbots as a platform, but expectations should be tempered. I've seen little to no overt marketing to regular users that they can ask a bot rather than looking for an app or website. Most users don't really want to download and learn another app and create another account for every little thing. Additionally, many budget phones in emerging markets have limited data, limited storage space, and minimal specs for downloading and running apps for every little thing.
That said, this article is pretty terrible. It almost seems like they chose the worst possible examples to fit a given narrative.
How has your company's interaction with regulators been so far? From your description and the animation on the top page of the Gyant website, it looks like the chatbot is claiming to diagnose medical conditions, which in most cases would put it under FDA oversight.
We honestly haven't faced much scrutiny from regulators yet (although I expect that may change once we become more popular). We fall pretty squarely into the existing rules on symptom checkers which have become pretty prolific on the web.
Not really. We have a legal agreement, and then the users state their chief complaint. We record their symptoms as we ask them questions and produce a list of possible conditions along with their disposition (e.g., Go see a doctor in 24 hours, visit an emergency room, home care, etc.) based partially on the Schmitt-Thompson protocol. Schmitt-Thompson is the current battle-tested standard for medical triage.
Why did you decide to build a chatbot, rather than a website/app? It seems like it should always be possible to provide a better experience in an app.
So far I've heard only three compelling reasons: to support users without smart phones, to support voice interfaces or to be accessible through Slack etc.
We support voice interfaces and we can support other platforms such as Slack, Telegram (we used to support it actually), and more. Like I said earlier, most users simply Google their chief complaint (e.g., "my throat hurts") which lead them to sites of varying quality such as homeopathic sites and WebMD. These sites do more harm than good. Users are also reluctant to download apps when they just want answers such as health answers.
Bots allow us to reach people all over the world no matter whether they are on their desktop, tablet, smartphone, or budget phone on every platform (iOS, Android, etc.). When I look at my girlfriend's phone, she has 95+ updates waiting and she's not looking to download more apps when a Google search would suffice.
We've discussed building an app in the future to enable even more features, but it's not a high priority right now. We're competing against Googling what's wrong with you, and we have to be just as easy to get started with. The priority for us is answering people's health questions.
You don't really need "AI" for this. For this "triage" use case a good expert system/decision tree is more than enough. Think of it like akinator for a given domain.
Hand-building the tree to be efficient is actually the hardest part.
Edit: yes, this is probably "AI" to some people, but AI only exists as long as we don't understand it. This kind of tech has been well-understood since the 70s.
There's a fair bit of AI, NLP, etc. The system starts out with decision trees built by/evaluated by medical professionals and learns what conversational elements are required to reach a diagnosis. This isn't just a trivial set of hand-built trees.
I worked for a year at a super hyped chat-bot company that raised a lot of money pre-revenue, pre-customers, etc. The difference between the press / marketing and the actual product built was incredible. Last I heard they are ditching everything they already built and starting over.
When the technology is there, I think it will be a big deal. Who knows how long that will take, though, mastering conversational language is getting into AGI territory.
The power of chat bots is in marketing. They compete with email marketing as a more responsive medium. This is because platforms like Messenger allow much greater interaction from the user than email. Most think of chat bots as a textual experience, but you can actually build entire UIs with Messenger that include images and buttons. In a way, it can be thought of as less frictional minimalistic website via chat. Eventually you will be able to buy things directly in chat, closing the loop entirely.
Chatbots are really just a way to push and pull messages on messaging channels, nothing more, nothing less. How much automation you put behind it is really up to you. And yes, many early examples forgot about their users. Yes, it is cool to write a bot that can do something cool for a fraction of use cases, but as always, solving a real problem trumps being cool.
Now chatbots can be used as a content distribution channel (see publishers’ bots), app replacement (Swell is a great example, and they are in the next YC batch, congrats to them), but I’d like to point out how makers miss the point on arguably the largest use case for messaging in the business world today, customer service. Yes, most bots that address this domain can’t live up to the expectation either. And really, just think Job to be Done, the customer wants a quick, accurate and preferably personal reply to their question or issue, it is that simple.
So what we (Bicycle AI) did to make our clients better at this Job is we are fusing human and AI for a faster, affordable and scalable solution for SMEs. I hear you say, wait, isn’t this like Digital Genius, well, nope, we integrate with Intercom for example and we have a team of AI supervisors who approve the answers suggested by our AI.
This means our clients can provide blazing fast customer service for their customers 24/7 and according to their volumes. Simple as that. We use past conversation history and product docs to generate our suggested answers. We can go live pretty fast and can take care of around 60-70% of incoming conversations, escalating the complex cases after engagement.
Aaand, we are in alfa stage with emails.
So when it comes to harnessing automation in customer service, we believe that customers should not be the ones dealing with the rough edges.
One idea I've been mentioning whenever this sort of thing comes up are those 20-question bots. I remember several years ago being blown away by its ability to guess some extremely specific and random things. I always thought it would be an interesting interface for a "find" function in an OS. I think it might work as front-line support as well.
Interactive voice response (IVR) is a technology that allows a computer to interact with humans through the use of voice and DTMF tones input via keypad.
The way I see it, chatbots should be there to save companies money on first line of support by reducing number of personnel to customer interactions.. Like answering the most frequent questions and only if bot cannot answer those questions then it will redirect to real human. Not as replacement for the UI as they're used today. Also bots should be part of your website/app and not be integrated into third party service like fcb messenger. And companies should constantly check and improve the bot to better respond to FAQs (so developing bot is actually never ending process).
When a client sends an email it's parsed by an AI to find things that could be answered automatically (because the user can't be bothered to read the faq) it replies to the user.
It tells the user that it was answered automatically and ask him if it answers his question, if he says something negative it's forwarded to a human support
In some ways they are great because they make command line more popular in some ways the are completely useless as they turn something which should most likely be automated into a manual process.
Yeah, as a developer that spends most of my day at the computer, the exciting thing about "bots" is the potential coelecensce of disparate UI paradigms
Whenever I get on one of those call center lines, I always try the command "Agent", instead of following their rabbithole of decision tree.
These "bot" cult members say this time it's different because now we have deep learning and it's different from the shitty comcast/verizon call center lines where you have to walk down the decision tree.
But the problem is 99% of these people have no idea what they are talking about. They probably saw the Lee Sedol match and thought AI has made some huge breakthrough almost like quantum computing. It hasn't. The accuracy has gotten better and that surely enables a lot of things, but this has nothing to do with what these idiots are trying to build.
If you look at the type of people considered "experts" in the chatbot scene, you'll immediately understand how ridiculous this is. Most of them are non technical people who don't even know how to write a simple program.
It's hilarious watching these "chatbot experts" talking about how the "old approach" to AI was all about stupid decision tree whereas "NOW with deep learning you can actually let the machine learn!" haha welcome to "machine learning".
I feel disappointed when I read articles like this. It seems the whole production side of the market doesn't get yet what it's supposed to do. But it's so obvious.
If you chat with a bot you have near-human expectations. Yes it should be flexible and not just one-purpose. That's the reason for chatbots instead of a button. And if you can't provide that you need to use bots to make human labour cheaper, e.g. telephone bots who make support hotlines cheaper by getting some of the details out of the way before sending you to a human. Success will come to companies who can work in this gray area where bots and humans interact to provide a service together. I think Amazon did the same, when they started their suggestion engine, where actually humans would do the sorting at first, then supported by machine learning and finally they got replaced by pure software.
it reminds me of mIRC bots of the late 90s that would +o you in a channel upon joining, kick people who -o or kicked you, or did other simple reactionary things.
>>There are also things which would otherwise have to have been a separate app. I don't want to download another app.
I feel your pain. I'm tired of all these attempts to monitize data with apps, Web pages and adds. I'd rather have a single platform I could just type in weather @ 99999 to see the forecast. Kind of like SMS 10 years ago but with graphical and audio response capability.
This is where I'm a bit baffled by the implication this is some hot new thing. I've been using Google as a smart command line for a couple of years now. The speech interface on my phone was an incremental improvement to this.
There have been small improvements but the real breakthrough was a couple of years back when Google got good enough that i started typing search queries in plain English for most things.
They failed because it's not new nor is there a direct replacement market available. Just like video calls, it's not that it's not there, it's just not as 'wanted' as the creators of such tools think it is.
And why is this News. They don't have a product to sell other than a toy demo. No chatbot company can offer an easy to understand, measurable interface for customers to customize towards their own usage case, with expected outcome. You can tell me in bareface that your product is magic, and when it doesn't work, it is due to the bad weather. Though, I think DL based NLP technique is the future, however, chatbot is not the right conveyor for that vision, much more like a lot of money hungry dudes riding the hype to monetize their demo technology.
Bringing forms to the masses. My parents will not for the life of them fill out an excel sheet or an online form for anything, but slap a chatbot in front of it that asks 1 question at a time and suddenly they're game.
It's a tough one, I'm not convinced anyone should be consciously coached into the notion that sharing private identity information over chat is acceptable. Feels like a long tail to social engineering scams.
I identified the pain of simple data collection from customers years ago. I'd be very curious to see if chat bots actually helps, as every other attempt I've seen has been pretty rough.
Maybe it's because I am an introvert, but I have a simple question for estimating the success of any development:
"Does this product reduce the number of social interactions I have to have? Does it let me do something without interacting with another individual?"
Chatbots, because developers keep trying to make them more "human", fail the second part of the question. They "feel" like talking to a person at times, which is something I don't want. I'll just tap a few buttons instead.
A chatbot, voice or text, is a response generator, where responses are prompts, requested information, or state change (e.g., place order, cancel service). It's no more interactive than other tools, and the more divorced the interface from text, the more levels of complexity are thrown at it.
I've been thinking about world models and communication a great deal. In this context, talking (or typing) with a chatbot is a great deal like arguing with an idiot. If the chatbot's world model doesn't include the actions or questions you're trying to address, there's simply no way to get it to understand. Quite literally, its world doesn't include such things. Though unlike the proverbial wrestling with a pig, in this case, you're the one far more likely to be annoyed.
Which gets to another major problem: such systems are constructed, and serve, the interests of their creators and clients: the companies which create them, frequently not the same as those who deploy them, the clients.
Users' interests are at the bottom of the priority stack.
Some weeks ago I had the pleasure of calling the local (and pathetic) newspaper company after our Sunday paper failed to arrive. I was greated, on three successive phone calls, to a several-minutes-long pitch for services I had absolutely no interest in, when trying to address a problem created by the company in the first place. To put it mildly, I was not pleased.
And my standing recommendation to cancel the subscription (substituting it with a much superior national paper) seems to be bearing out.
Chatbots which treat interactions as captive sales opportunities will, I suspect, not greatly enhance customer affinity to brands deploying such strategies.
I installed some obscure instant messenger app to try the latest and greatest Microsoft chatbot a couple weeks ago.
Walked away very disappointed. The chatbot would give incoherent unfitting answers every three sentences or so. It was also unable to keep in mind what had already been written.
Where did all the hype over shitty chat bots come from? It seemed to fill up HN and every tech publication overnight. Now even Skype, an application for chatting with real people, has a bots tab. It was clear from the get go it was just another way to push ads.
Unless chatbots pass the Turing Test they'll be perceived as a poor UX solution vs human interaction. I see them useful in chatops tho. We techies like automation, even if it's dumb, but non technical users expect much more...
It's a bit disorienting to see this, and on the same day threads elsewhere in HN, with the HN collective wisdom that automation and AI is soon to bring an end to most kinds of human work
I don't think that's the consensus at all. I don't think there is a consensus, honestly. The only people who would say such a thing are the same overenthusiastic (bless them, but still) CS undergrads and/or aspiring social media climbers who also post about how self-driving cars are already a solved problem that will be universal by 2020, or that we'll reach the singularity by 2035, or that Linux will inevitably devour Windows on consumer desktop PCs by 2005, or that by the 1960s every large first-world city will have a single skyscraper-sized computer with resources shared by all residents via teletypes in every home.
Futurism is an extremely useful exercise as long as it's treated as a thought experiment based on current trends rather than actual prognostication.
The median HN post is probably wiser or better informed than the median post to Slashdot or /r/programming or whatever, but at the end of the day it's still an Internet forum for anonymous tech enthusiasts, with all of the potential for bias and tunnel vision that that implies. You still have to wade through mountains of garbage to find gems of insight, there's just sometimes a little less garbage and a little more insight here than elsewhere. I don't say that to cast shade on HN, rather I think accomplishing something like "a little less garbage than proggit" is a freaking miracle and that's why I read HN every day.
While I agree, I think the general consensus here is that automation will sooner impact factory and manufacturing work than helping someone order groceries via chat. As far as jobs are concerned.
Problem is how to part rich people from the lion share of the money they are used to take. You can't have automation utopia without redistribution of wealth.
