Our Chatbot Journey
It all started at the IBM Watson Hackathon in Autumn 2016…
A team of AIB designers, engineers and business experts (including some of our team) flew over to London to take part in this hackathon to build a bot with Watson in 36 hours.
The guys decided to base their chatbot around the AIB SmartMove app (also a Research & Innovation team creation) which helps customers find houses for sale, location information like transport, crèches, etc, along with offering mortgage advice and links to further information. The bot prototype was built as an app add-on to allow users to type questions in natural language which would be answered within seconds.
The pièce de resistance? The bot had two personalities; one for speaking to adults and one for the kids.
Since then, we’ve been exploring the world of chatbots and how they can help our customers.
We’ve been at National Digital Week down in Skibbereen, Co. Cork with our custom-built Facebook messenger chatbot which helped conference-goers find out about the agenda, events, accommodation and things to do in the area.
Sadly our bot couldn’t answer the non-event related questions it was asked — Harambe the gorilla and Donald Trump included…
Over the past few months, we’ve been looking at lots of different use cases, vendors and built a few proofs of concept.
We’ve also got involved with the CHAI (Chatbots and Artificial Intelligence) Dublin meetup — with Andy O'Sullivan speaking at the first one.
We even hosted the second meetup in our newly re-furbed Grafton Street branch (with donuts for all!) and had our very own Philip Kinlen speak on ‘How to Build a Chatbot from Scratch.’
Other speakers that really stood out to me were Théo Blochet from Fueled design and development agency who demoed a really cool hotel chatbot, and Colm Moriarty, the founder of energy saving app HomeHero who presented his lessons learned from building the app.
It’s great to be part of this community and we’re pleased to be involved with CHAI from the early days. We are learning a lot from other techies in the city and hope to continue this knowledge share. If you’re based in Dublin and you’d like to be part of the CHAI community, check out their meetup page.
Our chatbot journey has only just begun. Watch this space — we hope to have something real and working in a customer’s hands one day not too far from now!
