[simonkafan]

Using chatbots to solve support/sales problems is like solving the problem of autonomous driving by putting a humanoid robot behind the wheel: It's unnecessary complex overhead, just stop that!

If I communicate with a human, sure natural language is the way to go. If I communicate with a computer, I want clear, straight facts just one mouse click away. I don't want to text my way through the bot database, I don't want to add language overhead when there is no real human on the other side.

Am I the only one?

[dynamite-ready]

I'm not sure. Using a chatbot to triage support, or perhaps even actually provide first, or even second line support, is probably going to make for a net saving at scale. even if it's slightly leaky.

Would be very careful about where to use it though. You definitely wouldn't want to deploy such a product in a critical service context, without some kind of human marshal.

Something comparatively trivial though. Perhaps like, a super intuitive insurance comparison widget, that takes natural language as an input.

Sure, some joker will go off piste, and try to jerk the bot, but in those circumstances, customers are there for a reason.

There are of course, already products that do the insurance comparison thing, but there are a few markets, with a similar dynamic, that need a little bit more than good UX to coax requirements and data out of users.

Something like this could probably do it.

[jacobr1]

Right, most T1 support is using a template or script anyway. If I was building a better chat-support system, I'd create some sort of score that predicted the likelihood a generated answer was relevant to the question asked. If the score was low enough, present the question to a human instead. The redirection to a human could even be transparent to the user. And once the human answered the question, they wouldn't need to update a knowledgebase or a template, it could just be learned by the system. This could enable a lot of efficiency, and I don't think it would hurt the level of support a user is receiving, even if only because the current human-based support is so often just the human choosing which canned-response to use anyway. Replacing T2 or T3 support is not imminent.

[candiodari]

Why would a human that isn't related to the business but working from a script perform better than an algorithm?

Serious question. If you had a line to the CEO, or someone with actual power in the organisation, then sure I understand why connecting callers there would help. Any business that does that?

Because of this reason I actually prefer (voice) chat bots over actual people. It's clear you're working against a script and you don't feel bad dealing with them.

[xtiansimon]

<RANT> I despise telephone natural language support systems, most are inefficient and because I'm skeptical, I assume they're inefficient in order to further train their voice model and develop it as an incidental asset. </RANT>

I'm interested in any paradigm which can make searching knowledge bases more _fuzzy_.

I'm interested to discover if a chat bot can _orient me to a collection_ faster than I can guess what's there.

[mrtksn]

Dealing with chatbots and natural language interfaces in general feels like trying to make your grandma with dementia do work. For the things that she can actually help, you don't need her help and for the things that you do need help you need to understand the nature of her condition so that you can explain your problem to get a template response like a phone number to call.

[darepublic]

I think chatbot as customer service agent is a great idea. I don't want to wait 2 hours for customer support that just reads off a script anyway. Am I the only one? That being said I don't think we're there yet

[dkersten]

Definitely not the only one. I hate support chatbots so much. They’re rarely useful, but even when they are, I hate using them. No thanks!