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Personally I hate chat-bots. I think the problem they solve can be better implemented using a search interface and some workflows, which is generally all websit

by boyter 7y ago

Personally I hate chat-bots. I think the problem they solve can be better implemented using a search interface and some workflows, which is generally all website chat-bots do under the hood. This is rather cool though from an implementation point of view. I actually wrote my own really cheap chat-bot a few years ago, and its surprising how far you can get with a few simple techniques if you know exactly where you want to direct the user. A while ago I was working at a client site where there was an internal discussion group about building a chat-bot. Many meetings had passed, discussing using neural networks, building flows, should we use IBM Watson. Lots of talk, but not much delivery. During the next chat-bot discussion while it was happening I during that meeting wrote and showed at the end a chat-bot that was further along than anything else delivered, not hard considering they were still talking. Code is here for those interested, but please don't judge my hour worth of python too harshly https://github.com/boyter/really-cheap-chatbot https://github.com/boyter/really-cheap-chatbot Example flow of it Hello! RCC (really cheap chatbot) here what are you trying to do today? At any time type quit to quit.: pay bill Do you want to pay your bill using a credit card or using paypal?: dunno Sorry I did't quite catch what you were saying. Could you try typing it using different words please. Do you want to pay your bill using a credit card or using paypal?: credit card mate You can pay online using your credit card at https://plumbus.com.au/pay

tschellenbach 7y ago
Vertical specific chat bots with some basic AI intent analysis actually work like a charm. Watson, Dialog Flow, Rasa, Digital Genius and Azure Bot Framework are all solid options. Chat bots got a bad rep as people tried to train them on general data sets. There was a lot of hype around that but not so much results. Also they are not perfect, so they should be used with a fallback to a human support agent.
useful 7y ago
Someone here described chatbots really well. They attempt to address a failure of your product. The problem I see is that if you want to know what it's doing you could probably spend less time fixing the issues that the chatbot attempts to solve.
hackily 7y ago
I find that chatbots are great for doing a search for a user that didn't bother to actually do a search. For example, my team at work used to own a webcomponents library, but it didn't seem like people were actually reading our documentation. I created a simple lambda function that triggered on a webhook when someone messaged our channel, and my function would parse through the message for some mention of "help" or "didn't work" "how", and if they mentioned one of our components. It would create response thread to that message and just link them to the documentation page. There was no machine learning involved... but there didn't need to be.

by boyter 7y ago

tschellenbach 7y ago

Vertical specific chat bots with some basic AI intent analysis actually work like a charm. Watson, Dialog Flow, Rasa, Digital Genius and Azure Bot Framework are all solid options. Chat bots got a bad rep as people tried to train them on general data sets. There was a lot of hype around that but not so much results. Also they are not perfect, so they should be used with a fallback to a human support agent.

useful 7y ago

Someone here described chatbots really well. They attempt to address a failure of your product. The problem I see is that if you want to know what it's doing you could probably spend less time fixing the issues that the chatbot attempts to solve.

hackily 7y ago

I find that chatbots are great for doing a search for a user that didn't bother to actually do a search. For example, my team at work used to own a webcomponents library, but it didn't seem like people were actually reading our documentation. I created a simple lambda function that triggered on a webhook when someone messaged our channel, and my function would parse through the message for some mention of "help" or "didn't work" "how", and if they mentioned one of our components. It would create response thread to that message and just link them to the documentation page. There was no machine learning involved... but there didn't need to be.