How to arrange a date with a Chatbot
Ok, but what is a chatbot anyway
I am sure that everyone knows what chat is. Now I am talking about digital chat not the boring offline one. You chat with your friends about the next party in a viber group, you chat with your schoolmates about the latest homework on messenger and you also chat with your furniture store on ikea.com to ask if they have the couch you want in the colour red.
This is great isn’t it
Well…Smart people realised that sending plain text is not as good as live human interaction so they found out that -instead of getting on bike and say “hi” to our friends- sending different faces AKA emojis to express our mood is a great solution. This is how we arrived to the era of emojis. God Bless, nowadays we are so lucky that we have much more tools to use when we really miss our beloved ones than we could imagine in a few years. We have “animoji”.
So you just keep chatting and use the unmissable emojis. By the way. Do not hesitate to express your satisfaction with all emojis you can find to your beloved Bank. Yes, it is now available to chat with your bank as well. You can have immediate answer from an advisor if your salary arrived yet or not.
You might think that there are more and more people in financial companies sitting in uniforms in front of their computer in small dark boxes for one sacred reason, to serve you when you want to ask something. Naturally you expect this available 24/7.
Have you ever wondered if it is really a human who you try to ask out for a dinner after telling you your actual balance?
You would be surprised to see who is on the other side of the line…
I am Peter Jambor. I work as an innovation manager at Finastra’s Lab team. We have the time, space and human resource to take the red pill, and see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
We really wanted to have a date with this mysterious 24/7 available chatbot
We’ve started our research of how these things work. We have read several articles, and books, we have attended conferences and we even asked Morpheus to upload various things about machine learning into our minds.
Besides we are all superhuman in the team, we have great experience in how to define-design-code a proof of concept, therefore we thought it would be a cup of tea to create the perfect chatbot in just a few seconds.
Although we have had ideas of how banks can take advantage if machine learning building a fintech chatbot was something that really has deserved a lot more effort.
We’ve got really excited about having a chatbot, a digital assistant built in our IOS, Android, Web banking solution. Someone who can be always there as a financial advisor, a financial guard, a friend, a lover.
Great, let’s start building our own chatbots. Wait but how
Let’s just start doing it and it will just form shape. We have examined several great tools that are available on the market to create chatbots such like
- Morph.ai
- chattypeople
- Bottr.me
- Chatfuel
- Octane.Ai
Finally we end up at Chatfuel since we fund if the most suitable for us to build fast and easy prototypes. All bots can be tested on messenger by creating facebook pages for them.
We did design sprints with our own prototypes in order to find out what customers are really willing to use when it comes to chatting with a financial company.
We have tested several ideas on different platforms, we have also built Axure projects to simulate a chatbot. At the end we had projects in messenger, in Axure, in Invision, in our iOS app and even on paper prototypes.
Do. Or do not. There is no try
This is when we arrived to the point of no return.
I was the lucky one to have the chance to gather a team of designers and programmers in order to make our very own Finastra chatbot creator. What I wanted to have is a really unique, easy to use solution with all function capabilities that is necessary to build a well usable chatbot. If someone creates a chatbot with this editor it must be immediately available on all of our platforms, iOS, Android and the web.
We have collected all information of the previous tests, all the experience what we have gathered so far and we fired the start pistol of the project.
2.5 months later
The project team released the first version of the chatbot creator. We call it Conversation Engine. It is capable of creating chatbots in a really easy and really effective way. Just drag and drop, type and click and you are done in minutes.
In order to have the “wow” effect we even managed to deal with the problem of being real time. The solution is Google Firebase. By connecting Conversation engine to Firebase all the conversations that are created are immediately available for testing on various devices no matter if it is mobile or desktop.
Magic.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating
There was a big event organised in Hungary called Startup Safary with more than 3000 participants and 200 different programs. As Finastra Labs we decided to take part on this event as a host.
We have asked participants in groups of 3–4 to think of any financial problem that they face day by day. Try to think about potential solutions and ways of handling them. We asked them to build their own chatbots that is capable of dealing with their problem with the help of our Conversation Engine.
Most of these people had no clue what a chatbot is at the beginning of the 2 hour event, at the end they were presenting their personally created chatbots on stage. Surprisingly there were many emojis in the conversations…
These are the moments when you realise how great it is to be an Innovation manager.
Ok but what about the date??
It is really simple just create a chatbot that is willing to go out with you. The tools are already available. This way or another I suggest you use as many emojis as you can as long as it is cool but sometimes go outside and grab a beer with a friend.
Interested in more details? Just ask:)
