Rise of the Bots

by Rafael Casuso

WHO IS @RAFAEL_CASUSO ?

Who is @Rafael_Casuso

• Lead Front-End Engineer en StayApp

• SnowStorm CEO and Co-Founder

• Merlin Creator

• Fullstack Senior Developer

• Software Architect

• JavaScript enthusiast

WHAT IS A BOT?

What is a Bot?

• A Bot is an artificial intelligence with a human-like interface

• A Conversational Bot simulates a conversation through programmatic responses

• Are ChatBots the new apps?

• Next big interface after Graphic, Mouse and Touch is Conversations (none is exclusive)

• It usually runs on a messaging platform, external or custom, or is integrated into the OS

• Famous bots (a type called Digital Assistants) include Siri, Cortana or Alexa

THE INTERFACE WAR

The Interface War

• There is an ongoing War of Interfaces, driven by UX, with user adoption as the main goal

• Conversation is the most natural interface for a human being

• When Conversation is the Interface, Bot Personality is the UX

• Different interfaces can be combined, graphical and conversational for example, as needed

• There is also an ongoing Quest for the Lowest Friction

• Bots on Messaging Platforms dodge the need for another app installation, thus reducing friction dramatically

BOT TYPES

Bot Types

• There are endless possibilities for applications using conversational interfaces, both text and voice 

• Internet of Things Device Manager: command-oriented

• Customer Service: support and suggestions

• Digital Assistant: hub for connected services, reservations, shopping

• Advertisement: brand ambassadors, characters, friendly offers

• Healthcare: medical appointments, diagnosis helper

• Fintech: bank agent, financial advisor

• Education: digital teachers, virtual tutors, examinators

BOT INTELLIGENCE

Bot Intelligence

• Rise of the Bots have come with the perfect storm: the emergence of AI, online services and the digital consumer

• Conversational Accuracy is its UX success measure 

• Simple Bots are applications that perform actions in response to keywords, exact phrases or predefined choices

• Intelligent Bots can use Cognitive Services with Machine Learning

• Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the most important cognitive process to achieve conversational accuracy

• Machine Learning is based on general learning algorithms grounded in statistical inference instead of large sets of static rules 

Bot Intelligence

MACHINE LEARNING

• Discipline that uses Learning Algorithms, often grounded in statistical inference, to automatically learn rules through the analysis of large ammount of data

• Statistical Inference is the process of infering Predictive Models

• Predictive Models are created through main steps: data analysis, distribution visualization, transformation, predictive patterns inference from part of transformed data (Training) and finally model Evaluation with the other part of data

• Neural Networks are a family of algorithms and models inspired by central nervous systems of animals

• Examples are Google Cloud Machine Learning and Prediction API, Amazon Machine Learning or Microsoft Azure Machine Learning

Bot Intelligence

• Bot main needs: Understand (parse text into structured data, categorize user intent), Converse (build natural answers), and Take Actions

• Understanding includes extracting intents and entities from expressions through language models

• Converse includes language generation, maintaining context (entities variables, user reference) and building a meaningful dialog

• This main goals are achieved using Linguistic Analysis Libraries (Duckling) or APIs (IBM Linguistics)

• Examples are Wit.ai (now Facebook Bot Engine), TextRazor, IBM Alchemy or Api.ai

NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING

Bot Intelligence

• Taxonomy of models:

  • Retrieval-based models (easier) use a repository of predefined responses and heuristic to pick an appropriate response based on the input and context.

  • Generative models (harder) don’t rely on pre-defined responses. They generate new responses from scratch. Typically based on Machine Translation techniques.

• Short (easier) conversations with goal of offering single response for single input vs Long (harder) ones with multiple turns and context.

• Open domain (harder) where the user can take the conversation anywhere vs Closed domain (easier) where there is a specific goal.

NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING

Bot Intelligence

• Image Analysis extracts useful information from images, related taxonomy (tags and categories) and face recognition

• Emotion Recognition extracts range of feelings from images, texts or recordings

• Speech Recognition allows text-to-speech and speech-to-text

• ​Recommendations allows Frequently Bought Together, Item to Item and Personalized User Suggestions

• Others include Academic Knowledge Relations or Articles Analysis

• Examples are Microsoft Cognitive Services, IBM Watson and Google Cloud Vision, Speech Recognition and Translate APIs

OTHER COGNITIVE SERVICES

THANK YOU