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Chatbots have no ability to interpret unexpected responses, and are very infrequently trained correctly. My electric company has a good chatbot, because when I

Chatbots have no ability to interpret unexpected responses, and are very infrequently trained correctly. My electric company has a good chatbot, because when I said: "The electric pole outside my apartment looks like it's going to fall over" It ended up using that sentence to determine that I should go to emergency on-call, which is all it needed to do; further parsing was irrelevant. But then I called Fedex this morning and told their chatbot: "My package has a delivery exception." And it simply couldn't wrap its head around the problem at all — apparently Fedex doesn't train it to recognize terms displayed to shippers! — and so I had to battle through the usual "operator, domestic, 1234" route. If you have a chatbot, be absolutely sure to train it on every word your company uses for official purposes. The electric company clearly recognizes "pole" + "falling" as an emergency, but Fedex doesn't recognize "exception" because their mindset is "which division of Fedex Multinational Conglomerocorp do you need", even though they directly asked "why are you calling".

JackCh 8y ago
I bet the electric company probably takes all instances of "electric pole" to be a probable emergency report, since that is probably the most frequent reason for somebody to be mentioning an electric pole and it's safer to default to assuming an emergency. I bet if you said something like "This electric pole isn't good for the aesthetic of my neighborhood, please bury your wires." it would assume that to be an emergency too (or maybe mentioning buried wires would take you to the "call before you dig" department...)
- floatingatoll 8y ago
  Yes! Precisely correct, and as it should be. If I’m calling to discuss an electric pole, no computer system is going to react properly, no matter how many phone tree options it has. Better to risk a false positive of an aesthetic complaint now and then, than to have someone give up and hang up and then their house burns down later.
ryandrake 8y ago
Your last example reminds me of buying a computer through Dell a while back. I could know exactly which model computer I wanted, but if I called them up to order it, they would insist that I first choose between “Consumer,” “Small Business,” and “Enterprise” before even allowing me to tell them what I wanted. Then if I guessed wrong, it was: “Sorry, the Small Business division doesn’t sell that model computer, that’s only for Enterprise customers!” I don’t know if they still do this but it was ridiculous.

JackCh 8y ago

I bet the electric company probably takes all instances of "electric pole" to be a probable emergency report, since that is probably the most frequent reason for somebody to be mentioning an electric pole and it's safer to default to assuming an emergency. I bet if you said something like "This electric pole isn't good for the aesthetic of my neighborhood, please bury your wires." it would assume that to be an emergency too (or maybe mentioning buried wires would take you to the "call before you dig" department...)

floatingatoll 8y ago
Yes! Precisely correct, and as it should be. If I’m calling to discuss an electric pole, no computer system is going to react properly, no matter how many phone tree options it has. Better to risk a false positive of an aesthetic complaint now and then, than to have someone give up and hang up and then their house burns down later.

ryandrake 8y ago

Your last example reminds me of buying a computer through Dell a while back. I could know exactly which model computer I wanted, but if I called them up to order it, they would insist that I first choose between “Consumer,” “Small Business,” and “Enterprise” before even allowing me to tell them what I wanted. Then if I guessed wrong, it was: “Sorry, the Small Business division doesn’t sell that model computer, that’s only for Enterprise customers!” I don’t know if they still do this but it was ridiculous.