The Power of Chatbots

Chatbots (or conversational AI) now able to be used across webchat, messenger services and using voice through voice assistants and traditional phone call IVRs.

So What Are Chatbots?

Chatbots are essentially a service that users interact with via an interface, often appearing as a pop up on the side or bottom of a website, in a messenger or other mobile app. The good ones are focussed on helping people with questions about products or services or to complete tasks or transactions. All of this is done with the aim of taking the more mundane, repetitive processes off the customer service teams so they can be better utilised to deal with more complex issues that machines can’t manage.
Driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI), they seek to mimic human interactions without trying to pretend to be one. They provide real-time interaction with your business any time of the day or night , enabling businesses to service more people more efficiently and, if done right, improve customer satisfaction at the same time.

 Using a chatbot to book flights. Users input their data like destination and dates, and the chatbot returns relevant results. Image source.

Brief History of Chatbots

Since the 1960s people have attempted to create an intelligent human/computer interaction based on a natural language model - a model based on interpreting and understanding language as humans use it, based on typing or speaking in plain English. The idea has permeated pop culture for a generation or more from Hal in ‘Space Odyssey’ through to more recent times like the character in ‘Her’ that Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with.

One of the original (and probably the most famous) bots was ELIZA - a chatbot therapist who offered some basic advice to her “patients”.

A ‘conversation with ELIZA’. From the 70’s to 2010 there were numerous other attempts to master the domain. Strangely, most of these bots always offered medical advice or assistance. Image source.

In 2010 Apple gave birth to Siri. Siri is not classified as a chatbot but rather a ‘personal assistant’. The technology is widely regarded as the catalyst that spurred the rapid growth of the Natural Language and AI bot landscape.

Then in 2022 ChatGPT was launched by OpenAI and things changed again. ChatGPTs ability to deliver information that was mostly correct across diverse fields, from science to healthcare, transformed AI from something niche to an everyday tool.

How Do They Work

The brains of a chatbot is an AI which can understand, process and respond to text and voice.

The basic old-school models use a template and ‘listen’ for specific keywords. In these models, if the ‘right’ keywords aren’t used, then the chatbot can’t effectively interact as it has a limited number of outputs, based on inputs from users. Getting those inputs right is a difficult and extremely time-consuming task.

More advanced chatbots use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to help computers comprehend requests and allow them to respond within the context. Chatbots using NLP understand the context and meaning behind a query, even when it doesn’t use a specified set of keywords. These chatbots also use Machine Learning (ML) to train their knowledge base to better understand topics and areas of expertise, allowing them to become more helpful to users as time goes on. A big challenge with these chatbots is that they sometimes hallucinate. An AI hallucination is where the AI gives a response in a correct looking format but the answer is not true and does not accurately reference the bots training data.

Enter Revium's own AI bot - Raibot. Our custom software powered by OpenAi uses new tech based on Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to avoid hallucinations.

What Can Chatbots Do?

The basic use case for a chatbot is to make it easier for the user to interact with a business to accomplish a task. For example, you may interact with a chatbot to help you with a support request on a website to change your address details instead of waiting for a support agent on the phone. Chatbots can execute repetitive, mundane requests at scale to allow human staff to focus on more complex requests.

Depending on the implementation chatbots can also hand off conversations that they cannot assist with by seamlessly transferring the information you’ve already provided to a support agent that can continue the conversation. This still saves support staff time and if handled well does not cause any friction with the customer or prospect.

Raibot has a much wider range of abilities including being able to scan websites, PDFs, and Word documents alongside custom data management and relevance weighting options.

The Omni Channel Experience

In an age where clients expect immediate responses to their requests, chatbots can assist across a number of interaction points.

A number of chatbot platforms can offer a true omni channel experience utilising a single core chatbot that can interact via website chat, Facebook Messenger, Virtual Assistants (like Google or Alexa) and also over telephone using text to voice and voice to text technologies (using a service like Twilio Voice API).

This approach provides efficiency in development of the core conversation flows (create it once and use it across multiple channels) whilst also allowing for branching with different variations of language or response across each channel. 

Challenges

Although the AI driven chatbots have improved exponentially over the past few years, they still require some work to keep up normal conversations. It is difficult for these models to interpret the tone of a conversation and fully understand the context of every sentence a human can throw at them. Some language models add in frustration detection protocols for the requests received and, based on a threshold, decide whether or not to handoff to a human to complete the conversation with the user.

It is also best practice to not attempt to hide the fact that people are interacting with a bot. There are a group of users that will prefer to interact with a human and refuse to chat with a computer – and it is far better if you don’t try to trick this cohort. You can always set up the chatbot to hand off to the correct human assistant for the group of people that prefer this interaction. If users aren’t forced into only using a chatbot then this is a fairly simple challenge to overcome.

Chatbots are evolving rapidly and becoming more powerful, with use cases extending far beyond the initial applications that had been imagined 50+ years ago. Organisations can leverage them as a business tool alongside traditional front-line staff to provide customer support and sales assistance. In an age when visitors are trying to connect with brands when it suits them, having an effective AI chatbot to guide and support these interactions means brands can connect with more users in helpful ways no matter the time of day.

If you have any questions or would like a demo of our AI chatbot's capabilities please get in touch.