Chatbots don't work!!

My answer is simple:

"Chatbots are very different to AI chatbots. Many websites nowadays have chatbots. You open the chatbot and it asks for your name, email etc, by which time you are already irritated. Then you ask a question, but it only really has a list of frequently asked questions. Unless you know the keywords the FAQs are useless.

At the best all the chatbot can do is list some of its frequently asked questions. If you want to understand an issue, the chatbot is useless. It's no more than a Contact Us form where you type up the message and invariably the company doesn't bother to respond. This is tragic. I have many times been a genuine potential customer and due to lack of a response, I've gone elsewhere. You wonder why a company bothers to have a web site or Contact Us form or chatbot if they don't respond.

Are AI chatbots any better? In theory, YES, but in practice many don't work. Let's put it out there right now that some AI chatbots, like ours, DO WORK. Other AI chatbots don't work. Yes, you can ask an AI chatbot a question and it will answer, but often the answer doesn't make sense.

Search for the "DPD AI chatbot" to see an example.

Why is this? It's not a chatbot or an AI issue, but a people problem. They implement a chatbot by taking someone's code and using it without proper implementation or testing. The software might be good, but unless it is tested and the testers understand the business, it will always go wrong.

So, how are we different? We firstly get to understand the business and what they would need from an AI chatbot. We then look at the knowledgebase that we will need to give to the chatbot. If it's a list of frequently asked questions, we know that more knowledge is required and we will collect and use it to train the AI chatbog

Once we have an initial knowledgebase and trained the AI chatbot we start testing it. We start with a standard list of questions and add additional questions. We use different wording to ensure that the AI chatbot can understand the complexities of the business. In one case and long before we went live we discovered that on an entire website the client's email address was never mentioned! The only email address that was on the web site was that of the web designer. In another case the telephone number on the website was a discontinued cell number! If we had not performed a proper due diligence and testing the AI chatbot would have given out the wrong email address and the wrong telephone number. It also confirms that a website is not an ideal source of data for an AI chatbot. A lot more work and data is required.

Our next step is to re-train the AI chatbot. This is an on-going process and every question and every answer is evaluated and updated if necessary even after the AI chatbot goes live.