The whole tech world is abuzz with the concept of new age bots or better known as #ChatBots, which is claimed to have taken the entire world by a storm with its ‘revolutionary way of changing lives and changing human behaviour’. With headlines like Google acquiring API.ai. Amazon acqui-hiring Angel.ai, Twitter introducing chatbots for brands etc. making the waves and given the spree of tech giants in acquiring these bots, chatbots have become the talk of the town in Silicon Valley.
For starters: What is a chatbot?
It’s simply a piece or pieces of software glued together to help users interact with a system either via text or voice or spidey’s webshooters. In turn, with the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) or a set of pre-defined rules, the chatbots respond with information (sometimes relevant, sometimes not) and help you find an answer or complete a task with a million interactions. Yes, I know, million is too overwhelming!
Bots are not new. We have been using them for ages now albeit in different forms. One common form was the automatic phone assistance. When you called your bank, telephone provider or airline, you went on pressing 1, 4, 2, 8 and finally talked to real humans after 22 minutes of dialling in numbers after numbers. Now, they have simply gotten into the body of chats.
“You are dating an OS, what’s it like?”
In 2013, Theodore Twombly develops a relationship with Samantha. (Who wouldn’t want to when it’s the smoky voice of Scarlett Johansson?) Who is Samantha? Samantha is a computer that can make love to you. Really!!! See it yourself….
Jokes apart, ‘Her’ as a movie was nice and different. I certainly liked it and I am sure most of you would have appreciated the novelty too. But, would you live that life? Absolutely not. We are already heading towards a life that is taking human contact out of the picture.
IMHO (for the bots, I mean ‘In My Honest Opinion’), I don’t see a great value around chatbots that would change the way we interact with other systems. Chatbots would make sense and be a great fit for certain use cases like Customer Service where a bot can be used to deflect the basic how-to questions but adopting it for every damn use-case simply because of its hype doesn’t make sense at all. Businesses need to analyze their support trends, understand their user’s personas and deploy the bot where it makes complete sense and not nuisance. To me, basically, the conversation as an interface needs to be a natural way to engage and interact with the system or an application.
A Million Steps
Here is a typical example of a person trying to interact with an e-commerce chatbot. Ideally, a person has to spend several minutes to even see the list of recommended products, then continue to choose multiple other options to make the payment and after a long battle, end up completing the order. By doing all this, actually the chatbots are silently training us to keep calm and be patient.
Let’s say the technology evolves and the chatbots become supremely intelligent, still it can only reduce the number of steps to complete the interaction and it doesn’t seem to improve the user experience to become the next-big thing.
Instead, I would strongly recommend to build a simple, intuitive and user-friendly website that will allow users to complete their order with just a couple of clicks and do the Happy Feet dance with the new pair of shoes.
For the same ecommerce use-case, they can adopt a chatbot in order to handle queries raised by their customers such as refund policy, payment & billing options, best practices and anything that’s frequently asked by their customers. This will take the load off from your customer service experts because the bot can help in deflecting these simple and repetitive questions.
So what’s your take on chatbots? Are you falling in love with it or are the chatbots making you learn to keep calm?
