AI has taken chatbots to a whole new level.
What is a Chatbot?
First things first, what is a chatbot?
A chatbot is that small little icon, usually in the bottom right of your screen, that will enable you to interact by text with the business, organisation or government department whose website you are visiting.
The chatbots of old were rules-based chatbots, that is, they followed pre-defined rules and scripts. A typical process for this type of chatbot was that it asked you to choose 1 for sales, 2 for customer support or 3 for payments. After choosing this and then explaining your issue or requirements, you may have eventually been put through to a real human being. Insurance companies, banks, government departments and many other big businesses and organisations have been using these type of chatbots since the mid 2000’s.
The new chatbots are driven by artificial intelligence or AI. These chatbots are far more natural in their responses, are capable of handling complex conversations and can be voice activated.
I Hate Chatbots
Now that we know what a chatbot is, you might be thinking, but I hate chatbots! And who can blame you. We’ve been taking the people out of customer service for some time now and it can be daunting and frustrating. Who amongst hasn’t been stuck with the endless loop of canned responses like “Sorry, I don’t understand”.
We assume website chatbots have allowed bigger companies to streamline their operations and be more productive. We hope they have used them judiciously and not entirely removed personal customer service where it is needed.
Being comfortable using a chatbot to get your enquiry further along in the queue or answer your question is a modern day reality and maybe able to quicken the tasks needed to be done in our busy lives.
AI Chatbots
So what’s the go with AI chatbots?
AI chatbots are powered by similar technology to what ChatGPT and the other AI platforms are using. You can write or speak your enquiry using your natural pattern of speech rather than trying to identify the exact word. They can handle multiple languages. They can find information from a broad range of sources and quickly digest and summarise this, within the context of the conversation.
Like all AI, chatbots can make mistakes, they are not immune from getting it wrong or in the new lexicon, ‘hallucinating’.
Even with the problems, we predict more businesses and organisations will start using chatbots given the new AI technology. It is particularly useful for information rich websites. Organisations with large amounts of data to search through may find it very compelling to introduce them.
Example – Council
Let’s take an example. I live in South Australia where Councils are responsible for
- Rubbish collection
- Libraries
- Footpaths
- Dog and cat registrations
They also regularly
- Coordinate Justice of the Peace appointments and availability
- Hold events
- Manage community centres
- Offer halls for hire
- Manage zoning for urban development
- Issue rate notices
Phew! That’s a lot of information for one organisation. Most Councils will have several staff dedicated to customer support to field numerous daily enquiries coming in from rate payers. Most Council websites are huge with hundreds of published pages.
Finding the right information for an enquiry on such a big website can be time consuming and a search may end up futile with no accurate or relevant answer in sight.
An AI chatbot can effortlessly and quickly scrape the website’s content and summarise and personalise it to the enquiry being made. It can not only refer to the organisation’s website, but may choose to reference other websites or .pdf documents.
Other Examples
Other organisations or businesses that might benefit from using AI chatbots on their website, or for their own personal reference, could be
- Accountants scanning the Australian Tax Office (ATO) website
- Safety consultants plying through Work, Health & Safety legislation
- Lawyers who need to read and digest large amounts of material
- Urban planners
- Medical researchers
- Travel agents
Already a number of default AI chatbots are being created. Here we can see there are chatbots for NDIS, Fair Work and Immigration.
Customer Support vs Smart and Funny
You can preview how an AI chatbot works on our two sites. In this preview you can compare a chatbot which has been given the personality of Customer Support vs one that has been given the personality of Smart and Funny.
Ask Digibot or Learn-aLot
“I’ve been told I have to clear my cache – how do i do this?” or
“how much does a website cost?”
By asking the same question, you can see how the different personalities the chatbot has been allocated make a difference to the style of answer given.
Next Steps
We’ve partnered with Expert Ease A1 to test and preview how AI chatbots work. You can visit their website here or watch their YouTube video.
If you’d like to explore setting up your own AI chatbot head over to Expert Ease AI who have a free plan to get you started.
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