AI unmasked: Have chatbots failed?

sasha uritsky

Oct 28, 2019

It is becoming increasingly popular to say that chatbots have failed and are overhyped.

While it is true that in many cases expectations from chatbots significantly exceed the results on the ground, the anticipation of chatbots’ demise are somewhat premature.

One of the main problems for chatbots is that the market is inundated with low quality solution providers who deliver low quality results. This happened because conversational AI seems to have low entry barriers. Unlike other recent technological darlings such as space technology or renewable energy, conversational AI is purely software and therefore does not require vast sums of initial investment.

What this approach is missing however, is that conversational AI, in addition to being a software, also requires an accurate understanding of how language works. And there is a limited number of people in the world that do have such understanding.

When conversational AI is delivered by AI experts who understand the way human language works, the results are good and convincing, just as how you would expect them to be.

Suffering from unsatisfactory product quality is a common problem for many new and emerging industries. The rules of the market dictate that most of the low quality players will eventually disappear. Poorly created chatbots will therefore not be around for too long.

See how a chatbot will help your businessnmodes.com

Interested in reading more? Check out our other blogs:

3 ways AI will increase your sales

Many of us get the understanding of artificial intelligence from the film industry. It creates an image of smart, humanized machines that are helpful, efficient and omnipresent. It is true that AI has seen rapid advances in the past several years, to the point that it became an integral part of our everyday life. In real life, however, AI is far away from the level portrayed in sci-fi movies. And yet there are affordable AI tools and solutions that can make a significant impact on your business.

Here are three main reasons why a company, especially if it is a B2C company, should consider integrating AI into their business process.

AI makes your sales process scalable

AI solution dealing with your prospects and customers works 24/7 without sick days, holidays and breaks. It can handle any level of traffic, incoming inquiries and conversations. It does not need to be trained. It does not have personal issues or bad days. It is always polite and uses professional jargon. It is fast.

AI creates better user experience

Some might find it surprising but this is only because they have experienced low quality AI solutions. A professional AI solution makes customer experience better primarily because it delivers the results with a minimum of fuss and maximum efficiency. A good AI eliminates bureaucracy, makes customer experience speedy and seamless, and that’s what consumers are looking for today.

AI offers sustainability

Adding AI to your business model creates long-term sustainability for the business. It allows your business to grow while controlling, or even minimising the costs. More importantly, it ensures that the business remains competitive in providing the level of customer service consumers became accustomed to. Lastly, it creates platform for future technical improvements and integrations which, without a doubt, will be based on Artificial Intelligence components.

Microsoft AI products

Microsoft product strategy has always been and still remains that of ‘zero alternative’. Their ultimate policy is for their customers to have no choice but to embrace only Microsoft products. Consequently they created and are offering products and solutions in (almost) every segment of IT enterprise and consumer market, including, but certainly not limited to, their own data base, their own cloud services, operating system, office tools, programming language, and many more.

Not only do Microsoft offer wide variety of products, they tie them up together in a unified ecosystem that makes it easy for components to connect and interact. At the same time, this ecosystem is hostile to non-Microsoft products.

Microsoft strategy for the burgeoning, fast growing AI segment is similar:

Create products to address all parts of the AI market, add them to the ecosystem to ensure easy compatibility from within and difficulty of use from outside.

Currently the products on offer are:

- Microsoft AI engine, called LUIS. It is supposed to compete with other major industrial AI systems such as IBM Watson, and has similar training methodology. It offers webhook interfacing via endpoints.

- Microsoft chatbot building platform, called, surprisingly, Microsoft Bot Platform. It addresses the popular demand for easy chatbot design and provides seamless connectivity with main user interfaces, such as web interface, SMS, mobile, and messaging platforms.

- In addition Microsoft offers their own messaging platform in Skype.

The main advantage of using Microsoft AI products is the built-in connectivity with user interfaces.

The main disadvantage is in their ‘zero alternative’ policy - once you’ve chosen a Microsoft product you are likely will be forced to choose only Microsoft products for the duration of your project.