[d--b]

James: Hi!

James: My name is James and I can help you with bank and insurance questions. Write to me in either Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Finnish or English.

Me: Hey, I am French, and am living half in the US and half in France, do I need to purchase insurance in the US?

James: We offer a full range of insurances to meet all your needs.

James: Select an option: Cars other vehicles Home insurance Travel insurance Health insurance File insurance claim

[statusgraph]

I get the same response when I ask "does my insurance work outside of new york state". It doesn't seem any more intelligent than finding keywords.

[olavgg]

Currently our intents match banking and insurance questions related to the nordic market. This type of question needs training data that is specific to the US region. There is no problem supporting it technically, it is just lack of training data.

[d--b]

That's not the point. The UI is not appropriate. It makes me feel like I can ask this type of question, where in fact it cannot.

I'm sure that if I asked the same question replacing France and US by Norway and Sweden, I'd get the same answer.

[olavgg]

You right about that, you ask a difficult question that a even human could not answer correctly as it isn't precise enough.

All I actually do know from that question is that it is related to insurance cover abroad. But do you mean car insurance? Travel insurance? Health insurance? As we do not have an intent for "unknown insurance cover abroad" yet, we fail to help you further. This happen sometimes for many contexts, but we work hard to improve this. We do cover this kind of questions very well when people have login issues, as this is the most common inquiry we have in production. It can be a range of problems from token issues, cell phone issues, technical issues on the website or that the account is simply blocked. But we often manage to help people find the final solution without involving a human.

My point is, we can solve this today, we just need more training data. Chatbots are not perfect, but with more training data they will become better, and be a highly praised service. Finding information using natural language is the future. I'm confident that we will solve most of the edge case inquires soon.

[d--b]

Yeah right. I think everybody's answer to that is: I'll believe it when I see it.

Pass the Turing test and maybe, just maybe a chat bit interface will make sense

[iamleppert]

But....but....they shipped something? However awful it is, they ticked that box and have their awful POS UI live for the world to see. And backed by fancy technology and expensive devs.