Our Biggest Update Yet

Janis.ai now provides a complete web-based workspace to collaborate with AI on conversations

Having processed more than 1 billion messages for businesses running chatbots, we learned a few things about where and why businesses struggle with chatbots and what businesses need to succeed. The latest Janis update meets those needs — helping business more effectively manage human and AI conversational experiences for messaging channels today, while setting up businesses for a future of what we call “Metaverse Automated Assistants”. In short, when you invest in training AI today, you are investing in your future with Janis.

By now you’ve probably realized that a chatbot without NLP (Natural Language Processing) is not a chatbot at all. It’s just a bot. It might understand simple keyword commands but people don’t message businesses using commands. Maybe you created some helpful buttons for your bot? Sure, it’s easy for bot makers to design conversations with buttons, but the data doesn’t lie. More than 70% of users don’t click buttons!

Dialogflow works but training Dialogflow can be awkward

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is sophisticated technology. That’s why Google acquired Dialogflow. The technology works, but the technology is only as good as the data you feed it. NLP needs data to learn how to respond and training AI takes time. We released templates that speed up the time required to train Dialogflow, but that really just provides you with a foundation you can build on and saves you several weeks of initial set up time. You’ll still need to keep training Dialogflow on an ongoing basis using real world data from actual conversations.

The new Janis Inbox for web makes that easier. Just roll over any message you receive and you’ll see a call to action to train AI. If the user’s message triggers a Dialogflow Intent, Janis will open the Intent for you. If it doesn’t trigger an Intent you’ll be prompted to create a new Intent.

We have found that it’s much easier to train Dialogflow and feed it data when you’re working directly from your chat transcripts!

Slack is good for some things. The web is still better for other things.

Slack was built for internal team collaboration so Janis pushed the envelope by integrating external conversations and useful tools to managing an AI integration. However, since Slack is an interface that we don’t control and there are limitations. So, we took all of the collaboration features we liked in Slack and built our own team-based collaboration tool on the web, focused on managing an AI integration. Some people don’t like Slack because the interface can be overwhelming, so we deliberately created something that had almost no learning curve — A more traditional “Inbox”. It has everything you would expect from an Inbox, but the chat transcripts resemble Slack transcripts, enabling multiple participants to be active participants and collaborate around a conversation.

Not every message you send from a Janis workspace needs to be sent to an end user chatting with your chatbot. If you start a message with the @ sign, you can mention other workspace users and you can send them private messages…

These private messages will appear in the customer chat transcript but are only visible in a Janis workspace. That provides teams with the ability to collaborate around marketing leads, or solve customer problems without losing context of the customer or the customer conversation.

You can also assign conversations to other Janis workspace users, and that makes it easy to better manage and prioritize conversations, while de-prioritizing conversations that have been assigned to someone else.

Speaking of prioritizing conversations, we created a system to label conversations as well. In this example, a business might have multiple locations, so by labelling a specific conversation with one of these location labels, you can just filter a list of conversations by location.

How you label conversations is completely up to you though. You could have ten different labels, with each being a lead score from 1–10 and you can prioritize leads by assigning a label as a lead score, or you might create labels for new business and other labels for customer support. It’s flexible and powerful. Most importantly, labelling a conversation and then filtering conversations with labels is dead simple for Janis users.

Being able to collaborate is key

When it comes to managing conversational experiences there are a number of roles that people might play in that, so we built role-based access right into a Janis workspace. You can invite collaborators by email and set permissions for each user, or a group of users you invite to the workspace:

Janis will create role based access and then email collaborators a link to the workspace to join. Agencies can now better collaborate with their clients, while large complex workforces might designate roles for different departments. You might have some users just responsible for managing an AI integration while customer support will only be responsible for live chat with end users when a chatbot can’t serve them.

Keeping humans in the loop is critical

We already know that chatbots are good at some things, while humans are better at other things, so enabling a hybrid human-AI experience is at the core of what we do at Janis. We built an extensive notification system for standard web browsers to bring humans in the loop.

Use our pre-built smart alerts, or create your own “Intent-driven” alerts. If your chatbot know a user’s intent is to buy something, or when your chatbot detects a customer problem and the intent is to get customer service, just set an alert!

Every Janis workspace user can set their own alerts too when they opt-in to browser notifications, so people managing sales and marketing can set up alerts that are relevant to them, while customer support could set their own alerts. When you get an alert, you can watch your automated conversation unfold in real-time, or just type a message to pause your automation and take over live to retain your users. As usual, Janis will automatically resume your automation after 10 minutes of messaging inactivity so your customers are always getting responses to messages.

To get started with Janis for web all you need is a Google account to take advantage of all of these features. If you’re a Slack user, you can sign-in with Slack and link a Slack workspace and then continue to work from Slack or use the Janis web portal and everything stays in sync. Best of all, Janis now also consolidates accounts, so you can sign-in just once and Janis will automatically sign you into all of your workspaces so you can easily toggle between them.

This feature is particularly helpful for agencies working with clients who each can have their own workspace.

Let us know what you think about the new Janis for Web experience in the comments below, and sign-in to check it all out!