Alex RaineyAlex is an experienced CTO and founder who largely focuses on all the technical areas of My AskAI, from AI Engineering, Technical Product Management and overall Platform Development.
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Sep 6, 2024 10:09 PM
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Sep 6, 2024
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Chatbots have negative connotations.
Around 10 years ago, they were all the rage. Google and Facebook released powerful tools to build chatbots for every use case. The idea was that these chat assistants would live in FB Messenger or WhatsApp. Then the big customer support providers all got onboard. Within Intercom or Zendesk, you could build these complex conversation flows that customers would be routed down. It would help them get an order status update or find a helpful article to solve an issue.
The problem? They were bad. And really stupid. To be fair, they relied on primitive AI technology by today's standards — something called 'natural language processing'. It would try to match the intent of what the customer was saying. They failed to understand what customers wanted to do. They tripped up constantly. They apologised every other message when they got stuck.
The result? People got very fed up and frustrated. And now, whenever customers see a chatbot — or a business thinks about launching one — they're unfortunately reminded of the past.
The challenge for businesses now
We’re way beyond the chatbots of 10 years ago. They’re now able to hold a proper, empathetic, conversation with a customer. They can diagnose issues. They can understand and use the knowledge from thousands of help docs.
We’re working with a company, Customer[.]io, who have over 2,500 help docs. The product is technical. And their customers ask tens of thousands of sophisticated, complex questions every month. We’ve helped them resolve 50% of their support tickets.
So I think it’s time to forget the word 'chatbot'. Replace it with 'AI assistant'. And start harnessing these massive productivity and cost-saving gains for businesses.
Written by
Alex Rainey
Alex is an experienced CTO and founder who largely focuses on all the technical areas of My AskAI, from AI Engineering, Technical Product Management and overall Platform Development.
