In one particularly striking example of how this rather limited bot has made a major impact, U-Report sent a poll to users in Liberia about whether teachers were coercing students into sex in exchange for better grades. Approximately 86% of the 13,000 Liberian children U-Report polled responded that their teachers were engaged in this despicable practice, which resulted in a collaborative project between UNICEF and Liberia’s Minister of Education to put an end to it.
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.
ItsAlive provides a platform to easily build chatbots and services for brands by facilitating with your customer care, broadcasting, acquisition and brand awareness. Choose across platforms and services you think the best suit your brand image. “A Chatbot that can’t evolve with your needs doesn’t make sense. We have solutions to communicate challenges, and you choose the options”. ItsAlive is out with a 2.0 version that you can give a shot.
The idea was to permit Tay to “learn” about the nuances of human conversation by monitoring and interacting with real people online. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for Tay to figure out that Twitter is a towering garbage-fire of awfulness, which resulted in the Twitter bot claiming that “Hitler did nothing wrong,” using a wide range of colorful expletives, and encouraging casual drug use. While some of Tay’s tweets were “original,” in that Tay composed them itself, many were actually the result of the bot’s “repeat back to me” function, meaning users could literally make the poor bot say whatever disgusting remarks they wanted.
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.
“Beware though, bots have the illusion of simplicity on the front end but there are many hurdles to overcome to create a great experience. So much work to be done. Analytics, flow optimization, keeping up with ever changing platforms that have no standard. For deeper integrations and real commerce like Assist powers, you have error checking, integrations to APIs, routing and escalation to live human support, understanding NLP, no back buttons, no home button, etc etc. We have to unlearn everything we learned the past 20 years to create an amazing experience in this new browser.” — Shane Mac, CEO of Assist
Disney invited fans of the movie to solve crimes with Lieutenant Judy Hopps, the tenacious, long-eared protagonist of the movie. Children could help Lt. Hopps investigate mysteries like those in the movie by interacting with the bot, which explored avenues of inquiry based on user input. Users can make suggestions for Lt. Hopps’ investigations, to which the chatbot would respond.
Enter Roof Ai, a chatbot that helps real-estate marketers to automate interacting with potential leads and lead assignment via social media. The bot identifies potential leads via Facebook, then responds almost instantaneously in a friendly, helpful, and conversational tone that closely resembles that of a real person. Based on user input, Roof Ai prompts potential leads to provide a little more information, before automatically assigning the lead to a sales agent.
Of course, it is not so simple to create an interactive agent that the user will really trust. That’s why IM bots have not replaced all the couriers, doctors and the author of these lines. In this article, instead of talking about the future of chatbots, we will give you a short excursion into the topic of chatbots, how they work, how they can be employed and how difficult it is to create one yourself.
