Fast food just got faster. With Burger King’s new bot, simply order and pick up on demand. Simply choose menu items and pick the closest restaurant to pick it up. The bot then provides an estimated time and price. The bot is not available yet, but you can see from the demo, how it will work. It probably won’t tell you the calorie counts per menu item, but you can bet this bot will be programmed to inflate food sales.
Love them or hate them, chatbots are here to stay. Chatbots have become extraordinarily popular in recent years largely due to dramatic advancements in machine learning and other underlying technologies such as natural language processing. Today’s chatbots are smarter, more responsive, and more useful – and we’re likely to see even more of them in the coming years.
Despite all efforts during almost half a century, most chatbots are still easily uncovered, but over the next decades they will definitely get smarter and finally we will distinguish human beings by them giving us silly answers as opposed to the much smarter chatbots. All of this will really start accelerating as soon as one single chatbot is smarter than one single human being. They will then be able to learn from each other, instead of learning from human beings, their knowledge will explode and they will be able to design even better learning mechanisms. In the long run, we will learn language from chatbots instead of the other way around.
Interestingly, the as-yet unnamed conversational agent is currently an open-source project, meaning that anyone can contribute to the development of the bot’s codebase. The project is still in its earlier stages, but has great potential to help scientists, researchers, and care teams better understand how Alzheimer’s disease affects the brain. A Russian version of the bot is already available, and an English version is expected at some point this year.
There is a lot of hype surrounding chatbots, and they are quickly becoming a standard part of any digital marketing strategy. Chatbots bots are very versatile services, and when setup correctly, can help customers answer questions and fulfill an array of tasks. Chatbots may sound like an intimidating obstacle, but with the right preparation and guidance, they can become tools that help you monetize your social media pages. I’ve put together a guide to help you understand the benefits of chatbots, how they work, and how to build your own chatbot online for your brand.
Marketer’s Take: This is a good demonstration of how you can add a gaming dimension to your bots. If you’re a marketer that likes to tell stories, then you can design a choose-your-own adventure bot that educates and sells prospective customers that are following along. There are many twists and turns that can be built into a bot like this, so creative marketers will readily take advantage.
Pop-culture references to Skynet and a forthcoming “war against the machines” are perhaps a little too common in articles about AI (including this one and Larry’s post about Google’s RankBrain tech), but they do raise somewhat uncomfortable questions about the unexpected side of developing increasingly sophisticated AI constructs – including seemingly harmless chatbots.
Several studies accomplished by analytics agencies such as Juniper or Gartner [36] report significant reduction of cost of customer services, leading to billions of dollars of economy in the next 10 years. Gartner predicts an integration by 2020 of chatbots in at least 85% of all client's applications to customer service. Juniper's study announces an impressive amount of $8 billion retained annually by 2022 due to the use of chatbots.
Facebook is among the leading networks for consumers to directly interact with their choice of brand. Over a billion people in a month use this platform to directly get in touch with businesses. A survey reveals that 56% of consumers would prefer any and all form of grievances to be addressed and solved via chat rather than telephonically. Furthermore, consumers expect the response time to be less than 5 minutes per grievance.
Messenger bots might also be able to revolutionize customer support. Facebook has become a popular platform for brands to interact with their customers. Many times customers will take a complaint to a brand’s Facebook page and have it resolved over chat. A Messenger bot makes it easier for you to get help. The quality of the support will vary but for smaller business that rely on Facebook for sales a bot is going to help them stay ‘online’ 24/7.
