Chat bots and rest of us!
Couple of years back I was looking for some property in Bengaluru. During the search I bumped on website of popular builder in that city. The website popped out a window from the right hand corner of the screen and the question “How may I help?” This appeared as a regular chat window on the bottom on the page. I instantly realized that is might be a chat bot, than a real person talking to me. How? As chat bot windows appear on certain interactions with websites, certain clicks, and probably time you spent on the it, or if you are about to leave it. These are the signs. I remembered the brief interaction I had way back in 2009 with an early stage startup working on similar technologies.
I had interacted to real person at famous hard disk manufacturing company, on the chat window, for my hard disk problem on my personal laptop long time back. So using real chat windows for customer support is very common, versus phone based support and also is faster than email based support, as many of us would have experienced. With advent of big data, and artificial intelligence, natural language processing technologies and their maturity has lead to many such interesting life-changing experiences for end consumers like us. The word ‘bot’ in chat bot, obviously has come out of word robot. The word robot, of course, when it was first coined, had a different connotation which is related to a man made intelligent machine. Of course, this technology is also has been advancing. So applying the same concept, a bot is a software program which works in the background, without end users’ knowledge most of the time, analyzing user interactions, text exchanged, and engages the user, or many times take certain decisions or provides information, to the source beneficiary. The key thing they do this automatically, with users’ knowledge.
I have been having a particular interest in natural language processing(NLP), specifically in the Indian language domain. Indian language domain poses a particular challenge not necessarily be solved best by existing NLP techniques. I also had done some work on the sentiment analysis on the social media for particular domain. This also was kind of a bot, for a social media, like Twitter. Some of these bots can even post dummy, fake items on Twitter or Facebook. I am sure you have experienced this, like me, especially on Twitter. Every now and then I see some social bot adding followers, posting relevant content on my page. It becomes, of course, a task to clean it up. As it is with any technology, there are those who would it for malicious purposes. But other wise many consumer facing companies such as telephone, mobile operators, banks, travel(bus, airline, car rental), property and real estate dealers, are using this technology-either in-house developed or bought from other vendors. Another interesting application of chat bots I can is in the health domain. Since I work in mental health awareness domain, I have talked of technology and mental health in the past here. People with mental health issues and/or their care takers can use mobile apps which are equipped with chat bots types facilities to allow people to interact with them and talk through their emotions, seeks standard help, alarm or alert care taker or doctor or a counselor on certain patterns derived out of interaction.
We also have been seeing voice based bots too. Many examples are in front of us, such as Apple Siri or Google Talk are any very generic examples. I use Slack at work. So Slack also has few chat bot-alike features such as /giphy command which is famous. Their bot directory can give you various options to incorporate bots of your interest in the system. Same is true with other bots such as ChatOps from Atlassian. They take operations activity, which is backend activity for any service provider company to automatically trigger, its internal workflows such creating a ticket in ServiceNow, by deciphering a certain text on the ChatOps window. Even cloud service providers such as Amazon AWS has service called Lex which allows to bots for their application using their ecosystem.
Some time back science fiction writers and experts had anticipated that robots will be everywhere. While it has happened to some extent, in the manufacturing industry, we are still far from seeing robots on the streets. But a silent revolution is already on, for sure, where we can encounter a chat bot or similar bot, whenever you are doing something on the web or mobile apps, at home or at work. This where innovation on automation is going on( I had talked of innovation aspects in my earlier blog here).
What is your experience on bots in general, chat bots specifically? Feel free to share!
