You are probably not familiar with Amelia chatbot, an IPSoft product so I’ll walk you through a quick intro. It consists of a web application — a chat window to be more precise, where you are typing and you get responses. To get an image — literally speaking, you can have a look bellow.
If you would like to find out more about it, feel free to search on the internet. I’ll write the review.
My overall impression is that this product is just another proof of AI hype and a good example of the BBB policy. I don’t see any business value. Not just that it has no clue of any intelligence but all it does is to read some text from it’s own memory or from a web API.
From my point of view, right now, the media is exaggerating when it says that this is an intelligent product that will replace people. All it does, is to follow some predefined steps when you are “having a conversation” with Amelia. For a very specific input like “I want a cookie” it (not she!) will reply whatever it is programmed to like “There you go!”. If you write in the chat window “I want to eat something sweet” it will not know what to reply.
So all we have here is a reading file system among with an avatar (a moving picture of a blonde non-attractive — I might say, lady). Is that it?
From a client perspective — yes. We have a predefined conversation that expects some specific input. In order to make the client buy this product you have to use your persuasive skills. I worked with an American that had a very good way with words. As I said, a good BBB example, a lot of beautiful lies. [This is not my cup of tea …]
The good part of this product is the effort that was invested in. Even if, at the moment, it doesn’t have any useful value, it is a framework where you can draw flows that Amelia will follow in order to “have a conversation” with the human user.
You can also write scripts to process the user input in groovy language. There are two other options like vanilla javascript and python but the support for these languages is so limited that they don’t really represent an option.
Conclusion
Amelia is a quite good framework for development. However, at this point, the final result is a predefined conversation. The user must know how to use Amelia and what to write in the chat window, and it will get back some text/data from a source.
You may wonder why did I work with it if I disliked it that much. There are two answers:
1) the short one: I was forced by the situation, after I felt in a trap.
2) the detailed one: which is the continuation from 1). I accepted a hiring bonus and therefore resigning was not an option. Aldebaran robots felt on my back and I had to work on them. For a year they drove me crazy and I managed to switch on this opportunity. I was slightly better, but still far away from the real reason that I was hired for — a .net developer. But at least I worked with people abroad which helped me gaining international experience, which, as stated in this article, is a must.