Making Your Chatbots More Human, But Not So Human!
We have come a long way from the chatbots which couldn't converse for more than a few statements to the likes of Siri and Alexa which can even crack jokes.
Although not a human, but learning! That’s how chatbots are evolving in today’s scenario. With amazing developments being made in the field of AI and machine learning coupled with deep data mining, chatbots are improving at unprecedented speed.
We have come a long way from the time of chatbots which couldn’t possibly converse for more than a few statements to the likes of Siri and Alexa which can even crack jokes.
It’s not long before when chatbots will probably beat the Turing test. But is it really the requirement. The purpose of chatbot requires it to be like human but not human at the same time. Confusing, right?
Well, let’s dive a bit into the ambiguity before it breaks down!
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How Human-like Are Today’s Chatbots?
Compared to yesteryear’s bots, Siri and Google assistant seem surreal. But a lot of hard work and time needs to be invested to reach the level of sophistication. Also, honestly a lot more can be done.
However hard it is to accept, the market share of chatbots is nowhere near saturation. The fact that a chatbot needs no extra space and can serve hundreds of thousands of people at the same time, has gathered it sufficient popularity for future growth.
And various fortune 500 companies have been taking initiative in this direction. Facebook, for example, has begun working on the project, “Persona-chat” which aims to make human-like chatbots based on more than 160,000 dialogues and recognize patterns in them.
Amazing advancements have been seen in this field with some as surprising as chatbots developing their own language to converse. That’s where the need arises to ask ourselves, how human-like chatbots do we need?
What Does A Human-like Chatbot Mean?
Chatbots in recent times have seen exponential growth. Chatbots today can suggest you options and carry out multiple tasks along with answering your questions.
But this is like having multiple micro conversations and we still cannot have a long conversation with a chatbot because it literally runs out of coded scenarios. This lack of capability to converse naturally makes the customer lose interest and result in lesser satisfaction.
So a more human bot means one that is capable of talking rather than just coming up with answers. A more human bot that can drive the conversation forwards than just keep breaking it. But what is the limit and where do we stop?
Lots of science fiction movies and books have probably given us a very wrong idea about the AI and chatbots. Judgment day as they call it is probably not on cards very soon. But yes developing more human bots requires guidelines and defined limits.
How To Make A Chatbot More Human?
Making a chatbot more human requires it to recognize patterns in customer’s responses and carry the conversation accordingly. Most of the chatbots today find keywords and come up with relevant responses. This works for most times but more than often it can backfire.
As an example, if the user says, “I think I must play badminton.” Most chatbots will come up with badminton products related links since the keyword “badminton” is found in user’s statement. The user, however, was looking for a more general conversation of an affirmation or a negation.
This is how chatbots lack the human touch. But by analyzing the data and updating itself more frequently it can probably identify the situation better.
What Cautions Against Unmonitored Bot Development?
Whether or not AI-powered bots take over the world is a debate many experts have had. But recent developments have shown that unmonitored chatbot development is not the best idea.
Jarvis, AI being developed by Facebook recently had to be shut down after it developed a language of its own. Similar advancements have made it evident that care has to be taken with humanizing the chatbots.
Security concerns, data collection, learning algorithms faking new identities etc are some of the major reasons why developers have to keep a check on the progress with chatbots.
Future Of Chatbots?
The chatbots have grown from if/else structure to data flow using nodes. Making use of machine learning and deep data mining, chatbots are evolving each day. With huge amounts of data available and the amazing intellectual working in this direction, chatbots are soon to see some major improvements.
Rest assured, chatbots have a huge market to tap into and with such quick progress being made, soon we can expect them to answer and converse like most humans do!
But I guess most will agree, as of now Siri and Alexa need to improve their sense of humour!
Hope you find a funnier and friendlier bot soon!
About the Author: This article is contributed by Amit Dua – Co-Founder & CEO at Signity Solutions and ValueAppz.
The chatbots have grown from rule-based structure to data flow structure. Making use of machine learning and deep data mining, chatbots are evolving each day. They are being accepted by major businesses around the world, inorder to provide simplified interaction and more engagement levels with the customer. They are certainly new and need human touch to succeed, but are far too intelligent to reduce the business complexities. ENGATI is a chatbot platfrom which uses AI & Machine Learning to create awesome intelligent chatbots & create a better understanding with very easy UI. Here have a look at the ENGATI :- http://www.engati.com
As more companies come to embrace chat functions to complement or reduce human phone centers, rudimentary human-to-human chat conversations will soon be a thing of the past, according to experts in the field. In the next three to five years alone, chatbots will become nearly ubiquitous, and work seamlessly with human customer support agents to provide customers with efficient, personalized responses. Chatbots are exciting and use the power of machine learning.
Here is a small video which will help you understand how and where chatbots can be used.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sACiBdCHec&t=1s