Member-only story
Chatbots (of) the future!
What’s next for Chatbots? How will they change in 2018?
Chatbots learn to do new things by trawling through a huge swath of information. They are designed to spot patterns and repeat actions associated with them when triggered by keywords, phrases or other stimuli. They seem clever, but they are not. They are adaptive & predictive in their learning curve. This means that if the input is poor, or repeats questionable statements, the chatbots behavior will evolve accordingly.
Chatbots need training, and users need to be carefully onboarded so that they understand the constraints of the software they are interacting with. But even with these limitations, reducing complicated, confusing processes down to a normal conversation is potentially very powerful. Worldwide, we send over 23 billion text messages a day. Texting is the most widely used mode on smartphones and over 90% of the text messages are read in under 3 minutes. Whatsapp, the most popular messaging app reported that they are now handling over 30 billion messages daily. Shocking!
Imagine how much simpler doing your taxes, engaging with bank processes, booking your ticket, communicating & learning a complicated piece of software in your company, knowing your company HR policies, interacting with external customer care — could be with a friendly robo-advisor over text messaging! Consider ordering a pizza — traditionally done by calling the restaurant and verbally order over phone; which is labor intensive, replaced with apps — which are time consuming in nature for order processing. Enter chatbots; which combines the best of both the worlds fast, convenient way to place an order while still having a conversation at front end while order ready…
