The Chatbots Are Coming: A Guide to Chatbots, AI and Conversational Interfaces
Transcript of The Chatbots Are Coming: A Guide to Chatbots, AI and Conversational Interfaces
Remember Microsoft’s Clippy? Well, thanks to algorithms, bots suddenly seem cool again. With all that big data at our disposal, and a suite of mobile-first messaging apps to live in, the 2.0 era of interactive bots stands to not only stick around, but entirely change the way we experience content. Suddenly navigation seems a little outdated.
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Messaging is the new browser, and bots are
the new websites.““
Mike Roberts , Head of Messaging @ Kik , sa id this :
Messaging apps are where people spend
their time online. Chatbots are a way to
reach them.
WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?
By 2020, Gartner predicts that customers will manage 85% of their relationship with the enterprise without interacting with a human.
Chatbots "learn" to do things by trawling through a huge swath of information. They are designed to spot patterns and repeat actions associated with them when triggered by key words, phrases or other stimuli. They seem clever, but they're not.
This means that if the input is poor, or repeats questionable statements, the chatbot's behaviour will evolve accordingly. Andrew Masterton - Hate Siri? Meet Viv - The Future of Chatbots and Artificial Intelligence
Chatbots need training, and users need to be carefully onboarded so that they understand the constraints of the software they’re interacting with. But even with these limitations, reducing complicated, confusing processes down to a natural conversation is potentially very powerful.
Imagine how much simpler doing your taxes, booking a vacation or learning how to use a complicated piece of software could be with a friendly robo-advisor on hand to help you through the process.
Think about ordering a pizza…The fastest way to order a pizza is to call the restaurant and verbally place your order. Apps are more private, and remove the pressure of speaking to a live person, but they’re more time consuming than picking up the phone.
A PizzaBot that uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) offers the best of both worlds. It’s a fast, convenient and conversational way for you to get your slice.
Worldwide, we send 23 Billion text messages every single day. Texting is the most widely used app on any smartphone, and 90% of texts received are read in under 3 minutes.
Messaging apps are taking over from SMS as the most popular place for all of this text-based communication. WhatsApp, the most popular messaging apps, reported that they’re now handling 30 Billion messages daily. That’s huge.
It’s potentially a huge business opportunity for anyone willing
to jump headfirst and build something people want.“
“
Matt Schl icht (Editor, ChatBots Magazine)
Facebook reports that more than 10,000 developers are already experimenting with chatbots on their platform.
And Slack, the world’s fastest-growing business tool, is investing $80 Million in new Slack Bot startups
Brands are already taking the chatbot plunge. These companies have all released chatbots into the wild.
It’s the beginning of a brand new era – there was web, then mobile,
apps and now bots. It is an incredibly powerful paradigm
shift.““
David Marcus, Head of Facebook Messenger, sa id this :
Today, bots are better at texting than talking. But
speech recognition technology is rapidly improving.
Talking to bots will soon be commonplace, thanks to a new breed of always-on home assistants like Alexa and Google Home.
D I D Y O U K N O W T H A T T H E A V E R A G E H U M A N S P E A K S 1 5 0 W O R D S A M I N U T E , B U T C A N O N L Y T Y P E 4 0 ?
“I see speech approaching a point where it could become so reliable that you can just use it and not even think
about it.““
Andrew Ng: Chief Scient ist @ Baidu
What we’re seeing is an explosion of apps that no longer have a graphical user interface.
2016 is the year of all things conversational.
A chatbot is a piece of software you can use to solve real problems for your users.
It could be easy to dismiss the new breed of bots apps as distracting novelties, or as the next wave of Silicon Valley hype. But the potential for well-crafted chatbots to add real value is there.
Designing useful and ideally delightful chatbot experiences will take investment and careful planning. Don’t expect an AI chatbot to transform your business overnight (or to rise up and take over the world anytime soon).
Instead, think of it as a logical next step in your product strategy. A well-orchestrated chatbot gives users a way to communicate with you directly, in the way that suits them best. It might also allow you to get more value from APIs that you’ve already built. But as always, the trick is to start by aligning the goals of your business with the needs, wants and desires of your customers.
We’ve been building great software for startups and enterprises since 2002.
Understanding our clients’ users and customers
Working with world leaders in innovation
Exploring new business opportunities around emerging technology
And we’ve built more than a few chatbots along the way.
Our team combines NLP expertise with a human-centered approach to designing software. That means we know how to define, build and train chatbots that your customers will love to use.
To test out an online poker engine we built for one of our clients, we decided to prototype directly inside Slack. The result was a PokerBot with an impeccable poker face.
M E E T S O M E O F O U R C H A T B OT S
PokerBot: A chatbot poker dealer that lives in Slack
PopBot: A curatorial photobot for Kik
Long before Kik launched their public Bot Shop, they were building experimental chatbots with TWG. We built a Kik bot that “listens” to your photos and creates galleries based on your preferences.
M E E T S O M E O F O U R C H A T B OT S
Markov lives in the wilds of TWG’s internal Slack channel. He’s still a baby bot, but soon he’ll be able to help us find resources and information by sharing what members of our team might say about a particular topic.
MarkovBot: TWG’s very own bot-in-training
M E E T S O M E O F O U R C H A T B OT S
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