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:

Scalable Yet Personalized

How to offer businesses and organizations a solution that personalizes and scales consumer interaction process at the same time?

Personalizing the user relationship process. Today end users and consumers demand to be targeted individually and to be approached based on their actual interests. nmodes AI (Artificial Intelligence) powered solution helps organizations accurately identify user needs in real time. Our solution delivers information on each user individually thus providing the necessary level of personalization required of the successful customer service.

Scaling the user relationship process: Once the organization identifies a user and a problem that needs to be addressed, next step is reaching out to that user individually. Currently this is a manual non-scalable procedure. nmodes AI (Artificial Intelligence) solution provides automated assistance to human personnel, including substitution when deemed appropriate, thus making the entire process scalable.

Today more than 90% of all organizations and businesses rely on solutions based on keywords, even though these solutions provide low quality results not sufficient for the new generation of personalized scalable services.

nmodes solution enables sustainable delivery of high quality results, with x5 costs reduction and up to 45% increase in conversation (engagement) capacity.

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.