October 2017, Stavros Vassos Helvia.io
Chatting as a B2C
communication channel
Chatbot Types
Chatbot Anatomy and AI
Chatbot UX
Takeaways
*Especially young people!
**Millennials: 20-40 years old at time of writing (2017)
Why do people like communicating like this anyway?
When a company contacts a customer by texting:
Facebook pages support chatting
Users can send "Inbox" messages on Messenger
Human operators can handle the messages (when they are online) and chat on Messenger
On the right side AI Assistants
AI Assistants can
July 2016, just around the time that messaging platforms were opening up for chatbot development
Web-based, users can talk to Rose over a website
"UBS has a new advertising campaign starring «Rose,» a quirky chatbot. Although «Rose» won a prestigious award for how lifelike she is, a practical test shows that artificial intelligence – as banks hope to use it – still has some ways to go at winning clients over." -- finews.com
What it takes to be human? -- nytimes.com
What it takes to be human? -- nytimes.com
Open-ended conversation is tough to handle; "off-script" answers show the weaknesses of the chatbot
A storytelling experience is maintained with tricks like moving on with conversation regardless of answers
March 2016, Microsoft releases @TayandYou on Twitter, a bit before the beginning of chatbot spike
Microsoft showcases the power of (its) AI, by allowing the chatbot to train itself on the responses by users
The experiment goes bad and chatbot shuts down..
This serves as evidence that it's (still) tough to make machines that understand and use natural language
E.g., consider Microsoft's resources on AI, VMs, etc!
Note that Tay essentially served marketing purposes for showcasing the cutting-edge AI by Microsoft
"Microsoft terminates its Tay AI chatbot after she turns into a nazi" -- arstechnica.com
On the right side AI Assistants
Messaging Mobile Apps, e.g., Facebook Messenger, have most of the UI elements that one needs to build a mobile app: Button, List, Text-box, Images, etc
Images in carousel
Buttons
Links
While the AI Assistant vision aims at chatbots that you talk and ask them anything, a practical alternative is the familiar "screen-based" Mobile App experience
Facebook pages support chatting
Users can send "Inbox" messages on Messenger
It is natural to add a "smart answering machine" that gives digital marketing content and information
More advanced ones may offer personalized content based on a quick interview
The fashion business has embraced social media and digital marketing and is very active on such solutions
Many other cases too:
News
Travel
Sports
Games
...
Very similar to what you would do on the website or the mobile app, with a touch of natural language
Popular chatbots offer a chat experience with emoticons, animated GIFs, chat slang, etc
Links to the ones we saw:
You can find and try some more on chatbot listings such as ChatBottle, BotList
On the right side AI Assistants
A lot of chatbots recast existing solutions such as:
Many tools for developing chatbots without coding, based on adding content and following templates!
On the right side AI Assistants
Relying solely on AI is still in research
Not mature for commercial use (yet!)
A practical approach that works
A practical approach that works
A practical approach that works
This is where you need to talk to AI experts ;)
Some simple but powerful guidelines
Alternative Answers: Don't give the same reply twice
Memory: Don't offer the options that the user has already selected before in the same session
Default fallback: Use smart ways to provide constructive feedback
Navigation as Interactive Storytelling
As human-like AI is not achieved yet for NLU, CM, NLG, chatbot design is closer to curated storytelling
Chatbots are computer programs; this allows for dynamic stories and interactivity
No golden standards for designing interactive stories
There are similar challenges in other digital media, in particular extensive studies in videogames
We will follow some main ideas from there using the gaming terminology
Linear storyline similar to the “one story” of films
Strict order of plot points, only one way to move forward
Players may visit plot points in any order they choose
E.g., World of Warcraft, Grand Theft Auto
Several open-world groups (islands) in a linear order
E.g., in Syberia all chapters start and end in a fixed way but the order of sub-parts of the story can vary
Branching depending on player action that may lead to different endings
E.g., Heavy Rain, Beyond Two Souls
The player picks story paths with his choices
A "Drama Manager" selects to enable/disable parts of the story based on the player's detected type
As the story graph grows, special tools are needed to design, maintain, and debug the storytelling experience
Targets well a large demographic (Millennials)
Can be seen as an additional channel along with Website, Social Media, Mobile Apps
As the mobile platform is dominating the way we consume information (e.g., in comparison to desktop PCs) the chatbot medium can become "the new website"; it's already "the new mobile app"
Plenty of DIY solutions for common use cases
Plenty of developers available for custom solutions
There is a hype similar to the "mobile app craze", you can't go wrong with building one now ;-)
AI is over-hyped and in reality it needs a lot of effort to build "human-like" assistants
No real guidelines for Conversational UX yet!
Content is king (here as well)!
Similar to website design and development: it's the narrative and the experience that matters ;-)
It is still in the beginning!
Every month the big platforms release more features (Facebook Messenger is leading)
Group chat with chatbots
C2C (Chatbot to Chatbot) communication
Chatting as a common API
Hybrid chatbot and human operator ecosystems
Stavros Vassos, AI Architect at Helvia.io
About.me: https://about.me/stavrosv
Email: stavros@helvia.io
Twitter: @stavros.vassos
Google+: Chat is the new black