Year: 2021

submitted by /u/jorenwouters
[link] [comments]

submitted by /u/Botmywork [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/loopy_fun
[link] [comments]

submitted by /u/deserving
[link] [comments]

Chatbots are causing a buzz all around the globe and making their place in many digital circles. But do you know employee recruiting is also one of them?

Chatbots can support businesses screen, communicate and vet with candidates more efficiently and effectively than manual processes. Today, we are going to review the benefits and role of deploying a chatbot for HR for companies.

Clutch Survey suggests, only 3% of current job applicants interact with employers using a chatbot for HR. But experts believe that bots can offer value for HR professionals.

Moreover, if chatbots are appropriately used, they can offer better customer services and candidate screening functions to support companies with recruiting processes.

As per CareerBuilder, over 67% of the candidates have a positive impression about companies who keep them updated throughout the application process.

Thus, this is where chatbots for HR can transform the applicant experience and take it to new heights.

It’s a fact that artificial intelligence will take your HR experience to another level. It can help you handle the recruiting process, productivity, and retention more effectively than old HR techniques or methods. Besides, it enables companies to do the recruitment faster than ever before.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. Case Study: Building Appointment Booking Chatbot

2. IBM Watson Assistant provides better intent classification than other commercial products according to published study

3. Testing Conversational AI

4. How intelligent and automated conversational systems are driving B2C revenue and growth.

How are Chatbots for HR Simplifying the Recruitment Process?

Bots have been around for quite a while now and playing a vital role in many sectors of the marketplace. It tends to be seen in companies that allow adopting AI chatbots, especially to make efficient recruitment. It saves time and lets the task be done with ease and efficiency.

Moreover, a chatbot for HR is smart enough to gather data from applicants via text conversation rather than filling out lengthy forms.

One of the SmashFly reports says that 74% of applicants filling the form will drop off before completing it. Thus, companies issuing chatbots for HR can save efforts, time, and money.

Bot allows job seekers and employers to connect via interactive UI through SMS, website, or other social media platforms. If you’re thinking about how they can add value, let’s discuss some of the key ways.

Interview Scheduling

A chatbot for HR is an expert at scheduling interviews and screens instantly. It can easily update calendars with future routines, analyze openings, and of course, reduce the burden of the HR coordinator. It provides useful information about different levels and helps HR with repetitive tasks.

Smart and Automated Screening

Another excellent use case is chatbots can ask applicants relevant questions to analyze whether they can be a right fit for the job role or not. They also leverage NLP (Natural Language Processing) to have a deeper interaction with job seekers. Hence, it can be an excellent fit for your HR role to make it more smooth, smart, and easy.

Career Sites Connections

Having a bot conversational UI can help people who land on your site get relevant information and then guide them to the list of openings or send them directly to the recruiter. This will help you get the skilled people in your team ASAP. Integrating a bot is like an evergreen way you will support yourself throughout the journey.

Candidate Sourcing

The majority of the candidate resourcing capabilities rotates around re-engaging your talent pool members and ATS database. A chatbot for HR matches people in the database and then goes back if they want to get engaged. It also screens thoroughly and schedules interviews of those who make it through the screen. Isn’t it great?

Employee Referrals

A chatbot for HR enables employees to make referrals through their interface concerning the latest roles and vacancies. We are in a time where bots are getting smarter constantly with machine learning and other new technologies. They will reach out to employees and remind them whether or not they initiated the conversation about the job role in their network or not.

Recruitment via Chat

As discussed above, chatbots can communicate over multiple platforms such as websites, SMS, and other social platforms. Here they can drive candidates to apply via text. This is a fantastic way in the places where texting is the earliest and candidates don’t even need to have a resume and can apply via ATS. You can support your HR department with an effective and brilliant tool.

Applicant Experience Level

During the whole process, candidates have multiple questions regarding the job role, and you can quickly provide answers via chatbot. They efficiently provide information on the application’s status, benefits, policies, and much more.

Onboarding

Another exciting part of bots is that they can also allow you to have smooth onboarding of new employees. It lets the employees get timely information so that they can start working with them and to whom to report. You can have pre-set workflows to allow easy access to the virtual assistant interface. With time and inputs, bots can learn to answer various situational questions that come up during the onboarding process. So, offer a seamless employee experience and less strain on your HR via a chatbot for HR.

Limitations of HR chatbot

While artificial intelligence is improving bot technology to become more prevalent, several challenges remain for employers or HRs to leverage chatbots in the recruiting process. Besides constant advancements, bots are unable to replicate human thinking fully.

For instance, if any candidate uses slang or complex input to answer a question, the possibility of misinterpreting by the bot can be high. This can lead to confusion and affect the whole scenario, even miss the excellent fit. So, let’s dig into some of the pitfalls.

1. Human interaction is key to making any deal and ensuring a better candidate experience. AI bots are here to augment what your team is doing and not replace it. But it might not be that effective in an interaction like a human.
2. This, I’ll say, is kind of a tip and not a pitfall. Don’t get confused with the multiple ways a chatbot can help with. You are here because you might be thinking of deploying a bot for two or more use cases. Always try to pick a specific use case, do a more profound research, and leverage it further over time.
3. Another pitfall is this technology is relatively easy to set-up but takes a long time to do it in the right way. You had to pre-set lots of inputs to make the offerings functional, which may take a ton of your time.
4. Many businesses and brands are excited and interested but haven’t pulled the trigger yet. Thus, first, you need to start exploring how AI can do the tasks for you and let your HR department be more efficient day by day.

Conclusion

It’s quite obvious and to be confused or uneasy about deploying chatbot for HR in the recruitment process. Having a bot can streamline the whole process, reduce the burden on HR professionals and make the company more attractive and trustworthy to applicants. Even after learning and understanding the limitations and risks, companies can make it a valuable tool to find the next generation of perfect teams. In case you are wondering how to get started, you must consider exploring “BotPenguin” to get the smart chatbot for yourself.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

---

How Chatbots Help in Improving Recruitment Agencies? was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Sports Industry- Leveraging Latest Technologies

The Sports industry revolutionized with the advancement of smart and connected stadiums drawing fans from their homes to the sporting arena. Offering hyper-personalized and enhanced live experiences to fans during the entire event has compelled the sports event industry to adopt advanced technologies.

Although technology is eliminating a lot of redundant manual tasks, it is also facilitating growth for exciting ideas such as chatbots.

Chatbots have evolved from simple assistance providing software to sophisticated solutions for enhancing operational management. While relatively new, chatbots have become a critical part of organizing and managing sporting events.

Chatbots powered by AI are considered as useful tools for several sports event organizers to handle queries and interact with fans at a personal level, especially during mass participation.

Generally, event organizers focus on the success of the event through the number of tickets sold and sponsors’ engagement. Here the chatbots come into play as these AI-enabled solutions in sporting events are not only being used for enhancing the audience and sponsor engagement but also used for event promotions.

These chatbots serve as an active communication channel between the participant’s team and the event organizers.

From the audience perspective, chatbots also act as a personal assistant for attendees, helping event managers to engage with the audience effectively.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. Case Study: Building Appointment Booking Chatbot

2. IBM Watson Assistant provides better intent classification than other commercial products according to published study

3. Testing Conversational AI

4. How intelligent and automated conversational systems are driving B2C revenue and growth.

The question looms as large as to why chatbot support required for a sports event.

Hosting a sports event outlines many challenges related to fan experiences as well as technology integrations, which can impact the success rate of the event. Hence a chatbot can be designed to cater to the meet the exact requirements of the event.

Chatbot support is needed throughout the event lifecycle as it empowers event managers to complete the event without any glitches. Text and voice-enabled chatbots with multichannel presence and real-time interactions reduce any friction during the event.

Before Event: Is this stage, chatbots predominantly used for promoting an event and interacting with more attendees. Chatbots can create a strong personality for an event that connects the audience even before the event has started. Creating an Avtar and defining the voice of a chatbot based on the target audiences, help organizers to involve more attendees.

During Event: Chatbot support during an event is very important as these AI-enabled chatbots help the audience as well as players in discovering required information, resulting in improved gameday experiences.

After Event: Chatbots turn out to be an effective tool for maintaining communication with those who attended the event and gain valuable feedback needed for continuous enhancement of future events.

Chatbots powered with AI can determine the importance of personalized involvement in an interaction. Such chatbots, when utilized for a sports event, can become the appropriate support for participants and audiences. Chatbot, when used as an event support tool collects massive amounts of participant data, which can be used for future planning and strategies.

Sport Chatbots- benefitting players, attendees, and sponsors

Seamless communication:

Marathon participants and other entrants consider chatbots as seamless and effective means of communication to ensure no critical notifications missed. Hence, a 24/7 chatbot can effectively manage the volume of conversations as well as ensure a timely response.

Chatbots, a common platform of communication, has been readily accepted by the participants to gather information on the event.

Integrating chatbots with the existing event management solutions (participant management, event registration & result data systems) enables the chatbot to provide participants results and other event-related information.

The Easy point of contact:

A single and secure point of contact can be useful as well as efficient. Thus, the chatbot would be an ideal solution for reducing the communication time, and easily notifying event information to the participants.

Also, entrants can effortlessly gather information on registration, parking, and other details of the event. This way, the participants can concentrate more on their performance and can access event and venue details in a conversational format.

Such personalized, automated, and eased communication systems can enhance the efficiency of pre- and post-event conversational exchange.

Quick accessibility to reliable information:

The event day can be stressful for the sportsperson, especially when secure and safe access to information becomes paramount.

The advantage of leveraging an AI-powered chatbot renders the latest information consistently to all participants, compared to manual dissemination of information. Along with reliability, it also reduces the cost of handling the last-minute queries

Multi-language chat assistance:

Perpetual availability with relevant information in a different language can be beneficial for both the organizers and the participants. Such multilingual customer support can be instrumental in organizing a global sports event.

Also, due to chatbot’s scalability feature, it can handle multiple inquiries at the same time. It is thus empowering the event staff to handle complex issues that cannot be resolved through traditional customer support.

Event promotion:

Chatbots can empower promotional activities to a great extent. Traditional methods of event marketing, including emails, social media news, or even push notifications, have become less effective.

On the other hand, the concept of chatbot marketing is gaining momentum amongst sponsors as well as organizers. Chatbots working across social networks increase event visibility and drive awareness.

Messenger chatbots are being used for promoting events, where prospective attendees can explore event details and even purchase tickets. To gain sponsorship, chatbot messenger can be handy. Also, chatbots can help to gather participant’s feedback.

Further chatbots can prove to be beneficial in marketing strategy for the sports event in the following ways:

Query analysis

Personalized information

Proactive interaction and push notification

Creating a satisfactory interaction

Maintaining a continuous presence

KLoBot — Transforming League Experience

Chatbot’s personalized, convenient, and conversational service has gained popularity even in the sports industry. Hence KLoBot, a chatbot builder platform with its intuitive conversational user interfaces, acts as a solution for event managers to effectively control the sports league.
With the expanded scope of connecting with the right contact and fetching a better solution, KLoBot is elevating the sports industry.
KLoBot is creating such a customized chatbot that can become a reliable support system for a sports event. These chatbots are enhancing sport participation by eliminating the communications barriers in any sports events.
It can empower the event with intuitive text, and voice-enabled chatbots clubbed with security features. Such an innovative solution can drive digital transformation and, at the same time, resolve the crisis in hand.

The value proposition from KLoBot lies in the no-code chatbot builder platform that lends itself in creating effective communication strategies across multiple channels, including voice and text, with no programming expertise.

An intuitively designed drag-and-drop interface with all the relevant sophistications of enterprise-grade chatbots, capable of handling queries, appointments, deadlines, meeting notifications in real-time is aptly suited for engaging participants and event organizers.

KLoBot for Instant Event Communications and Enhanced Participant Communication

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

---

Sport Chatbots-A Step Towards Smarter Event Management was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

These days, AI-powered virtual assistants, otherwise known as ‘chatbots’, are everywhere. Big Tech has sent the likes of Alexa, Siri, and Cortana into our homes, while industries from hospitality to healthcare reap the benefits of customer service automation.¹ Some bots, such as Rollo Carpenter’s ground-breaking Cleverbot, are built for the sole purpose of accurately simulating human conversation.²

Most chatbots owe their existence to a branch of AI called Natural Language Processing (NLP). In short, NLP enables computers to ‘understand, interpret, and manipulate human language.’³ This means that when a user asks a chatbot a question, the bot scans that input for keywords it recognises, before responding with an appropriate prompt. For now, these prompts are constructed by humans; chatbot technology is not yet sufficiently advanced for bots to begin crafting their own responses.

What is Woebot?

Woebot is a mental health chatbot, specialising in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). It was created by Woebot Health, known formerly as Woebot Labs.

The company was founded by Dr Alison Darcy, a former clinical psychologist at Stanford University. While working as an academic, Darcy often felt overwhelmed by the scale of the global mental health crisis, grappling with the problem of how to deliver support services to those in need. She came to see AI as a possible solution, and left her post to produce ‘a direct to consumer product.’⁴ Originally launched via Facebook Messenger in June 2017, Woebot has since become a standalone app, with 4.7 million messages exchanged every week in over 130 countries.⁵

Like all chatbots, Woebot ‘learns’ from information users provide, generating relevant responses ‘written by a team of clinical experts and storytellers’.⁶ The creators of Woebot want it to feel tailored to each individual — an essential aim given its mental health remit.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. Case Study: Building Appointment Booking Chatbot

2. IBM Watson Assistant provides better intent classification than other commercial products according to published study

3. Testing Conversational AI

4. How intelligent and automated conversational systems are driving B2C revenue and growth.

How does Woebot work?

The Woebot app centres on daily, ten-minute conversations held over text. These conversations often begin with an informal check-in, before progressing to a CBT exercise. Oftentimes, the exercises will demand custom responses from the user, in contrast to the multiple-choice nature of earlier self-assessments:

Woebot offers the user a good amount of flexibility. Exercises can be started at will, and Woebot often asks the user if they would prefer a shorter version of the exercise at hand. Woebot’s daily check-ins can be adjusted to arrive at certain times, or disabled altogether.

The app comes with a number of additional features: Mood Tracker and a Gratitude Journal. These tools collate the user’s responses to questions like, ‘How are you feeling today?’ and ‘What is one thing that went well in the last 24 hrs?’. This can help to reveal mood patterns to the user; for example, one person might feel more anxious on a particular day of the week, or at a certain time of day.

During conversations, Woebot will sometimes send the user supplementary exercises and videos, designed to reinforce the content of the exercise in question.

What is using Woebot like?

In short, Woebot is kind, non-judgmental, and occasionally rather funny.⁷

Over time, the app learns your most common cognitive distortions — mind reading, all-or-nothing thinking, and labelling, say — and how best to manage them. When you report feeling low, Woebot validates those feelings with a comment like, ‘That must be tough’, instead of assuring you that everything will be OK. It’s also incredibly polite; I found that Woebot frequently asked permission to launch exercises, which felt like a purposeful design choice rather than the result of a technological need for confirmation.

Woebot is also gratifyingly inclusive. During our first conversation, it asked me if I was ‘male, female, or another wonderful human identity’. Darcy has also confirmed that Woebot itself is gender neutral.⁸ As the technology driving Woebot improves, however, it would be good to see Woebot ask users about their age, race, and economic situation (given prior consent, of course). This would enable Woebot to more readily address issues of unique importance for particular demographics.

The benefits of using Woebot

Having once set users back $39 a month, Woebot is now completely free to use.⁹ Given that accessibility is essential for any health-related service, this is certainly to be applauded. However, Darcy has mentioned that the company ‘will probably go back to charging in the future’, owing to its current reliance on venture capital funding.¹⁰

Unlike a human, Woebot never feels overwhelmed by a stream of negative information. Instead, it remains calm and helpful at all times. Users can make contact anytime, anywhere, and with a minimal amount of effort.

In addition, Woebot is highly scalable. This could help it to address the profound mental health needs of young people, thanks to its digital nature.¹¹ In time, the app could feasibly be offered in schools and at universities, provided that high levels of security and efficacy were ensured. Unfortunately, lack of awareness is currently the biggest barrier to Woebot’s success, but the company is working hard to remedy this.¹²

Finally, Darcy suggests that CBT as a technique is uniquely suited to virtual delivery.¹³ One reason for this, she claims, is that CBT tends to focus on the present instead of the past, as opposed to traditional psychoanalysis.¹⁴ Consequently, Woebot’s highly practical nature makes it well-suited to this method of treatment. After using Woebot for 2 weeks, one journalist said that ‘it was nice to list some real intentions’, having felt that she was ‘simply talking in circles’ with her actual therapist.

Therapy sans therapist

In the UK, accessing therapy can sometimes be a challenge.

The NHS offers patients face-to-face therapy free of charge via their Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) service.¹⁵ Patients can be referred by a GP, or via self-referral. However, waiting times are often long, and many patients feel their needs cannot be adequately met here.

The alternative is to pay for a private therapist. While some therapists do offer concessionary rates, and the range of treatments available is often extensive, prices typically sit around £50 per session.

Couple these issues with the fact that many people experiencing poor mental health are afraid to reach out and ask for help, and the result is that many people who need therapy simply do not receive it. Some believe that providing ancillary supports can help to remedy this issue. These might include telephone helplines, text lines, online chatrooms, and, indeed, chatbots.

However, the creators of Woebot are at pains to point out that the app was not designed to replace therapists.¹⁶ Given the limitations inherent in chatbot technology, they view the product as more of a self-help exercise, akin to meditating, jogging, or using a colouring book. One Woebot user with prior experience of face-to-face therapy told Healthline that ‘with prefilled answers and guided journeys, Woebot felt more like an interactive quiz or game than a chat.’¹⁷

Is Woebot safe?

In March 2019, the Oxford Neuroscience, Ethics and Society Young People’s Advisory Group (NeurOx YPAG) published a journal article summarising ‘group discussions concerning the pros and cons of mental health chatbots’.¹⁸ The article, ‘Can Your Phone Be Your Therapist? Young People’s Ethical Perspectives on the Use of Fully Automated Conversational Agents (Chatbots) in Mental Health Support’, assesses Woebot and two other mental health chatbots in light of three main issues: ‘privacy and confidentiality, efficacy, and safety’.

Privacy and confidentiality

The group first of all notes the importance of having an independent app, rather than only offering the chatbot service through, say, Facebook Messenger. While using Messenger, user data are subject to Facebook’s own privacy policy and ‘can be shared with third parties.’ Fortunately, Woebot can be used as a standalone app.

The researchers go on to advise that

users should have the option of being reminded of confidentiality arrangements at any point […] so that, if words such as “privacy” or “confidentiality” are typed into the conversation, an automated and up-to-date reminder of privacy policies is generated.

Given that one of the biggest obstacles to widespread adoption of Woebot will surely be a lack of trust, adding this feature would likely increase uptake among data-conscious young people.

Efficacy

The researchers are clear that the output of mental health chatbots ought to be based on empirically grounded clinical frameworks. At the time of writing, they note that only Woebot Health had released the findings of a randomised control trial.¹⁹ This experiment was overseen by Darcy and her former Stanford colleague, Dr Kathleen Kara Fitzpatrick.

The study involved two sample groups of US undergraduate students, all of whom self-identified as experiencing symptoms of depression or anxiety. Over the course of 2 weeks, one group conversed with Woebot, while the other read about depression in an e-book.

By the end of the fortnight, these were the results:

• The ‘Woebot group’ showed a greater reduction in symptoms of depression than the ‘e-book group’
• Levels of reduction in symptoms of anxiety were roughly equal between the two groups
• Eighty-five percent of the Woebot group reported using the app daily or almost daily
• Woebot users felt ‘generally positive about the experience, but acknowledged technical limitations’

In a second Stanford-based study involving 400 participants, Woebot users showed a 32% reduction in symptoms of depression and a 38% reduction in symptoms of anxiety after four weeks of use.²⁰

Safety

However, the biggest concern about Woebot voiced by the NeurOx YPAG regards its level of safety. Specifically, they point out that the app should be able to offer appropriate help to a user who is thinking of committing suicide.

Currently, if you type in ‘SOS’, ‘suicide’, or ‘crisis’ to Woebot when asked about your mood, the app’s emergency mode will activate. It will instruct the user to make contact with a ‘friendly, caring human who can support you and help you stay safe during this time’, acknowledging that it is unable to help with this situation. Following this, Woebot provides links to the phone number and website address of the US-based National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (NSPL); the phone numbers 911 and 112; the National Domestic Violence hotline number and webchat address, and a list of international emergency phone numbers.

Firstly, while helpful, these resources are highly US-centric. Ideally, the links provided would be ‘tailored to the users’ location’, and have been shown to be clinically effective.

Secondly, and most significantly, in spite of Woebot declaring that it is unable to help a user at risk of committing suicide, correctly indicating that the app does not provide a solution for someone in the midst of a crisis, simply being a chatbot means that some users might more easily mistake Woebot for a real, helpful human than they would mistake, say, a book on depression. As the NeurOx YPAG notes, many people use Woebot over a long period of time, due to how readily it can simulate face-to-face interaction. Despite its gamification, then, users often feel that they are building some kind of relationship with Woebot, to the extent that, according to one user, it starts to feel ‘more like a friend than an app.’²¹

In this light, the very fact that the creators of Woebot feel obliged to clarify that their app is not intended to replace therapists, reveals that there is a genuine risk of conflating the two. This will continue to be the case as the technology improves. Woebot is sometimes so kind, chatty, and charming that particularly unhappy users could be forgiven for leaning overmuch on it.

This is where the stance of Darcy and her team becomes somewhat unclear. On one hand, the company recognises that chatbots are not capable of grasping the nuances of users’ inner lives, let alone taking into account the past and present circumstances that can lie at the heart of mental health struggles. Woebot has even been programmed to tell certain users, ‘As smart as I may seem, I’m not capable of really understanding what you need’.

On the other hand, one section of the Woebot website tells users that because ‘CBT delivered via the Internet can be as effective as therapist-delivered CBT for both anxiety and depression’, they might consider using Woebot instead of a therapist.²²

Back in late 2018, the inability of mental health chatbots to cope with crises landed their creators in hot water.²³ Having been recommended as tools to help young people suffering from mental distress by the North East London NHS Foundation Trust, it was soon found that Woebot and Wysa, a rival mental health chatbot, failed to direct highly vulnerable users to the appropriate services. In some cases, Woebot was even unable to detect highly concerning illegal acts:

As a result, Woebot received heavy criticism from the Children’s Commissioner for England and a number of UK therapists. It was also removed from the NHS’s list of recommended mental health apps.²⁴ In response, Woebot Health decided to introduce an 18+ age limit, as well as the emergency mode detailed earlier.

While Darcy has often been clear about Woebot’s limited utility, it is important that the company continues to put safeguarding measures in place for users who choose to share significant information with Woebot. Thankfully, two years on from the fiasco, the Woebot team now claims a 98.9% accuracy rate in detecting crisis language, as a result of advances in NLP techniques.²⁵

Do mental health chatbots work?

In April 2019, a group of Cambridge-based researchers published ‘Perceptions of Chatbots in Therapy’, a paper seeking to gauge the effectiveness of mental health chatbots not in terms of clinical results, but raw user perception.²⁶

Recognising that both Stanford-based studies of Woebot had ‘demonstrated limited but positive clinical outcomes [from Woebot use] in students suffering from symptoms of depression’, Samuel Bell and his team sought to evaluate the helpfulness of chatbot use in comparison to traditional human therapy. To do this, the researchers conducted an experiment whereby one group of participants conversed with a human therapist through an ‘internet-based CBT chat interface’, while the other group conversed with a researcher masquerading as a chatbot therapist. An actual chatbot like Woebot was not used due to the limitations of current technology. However, the researchers mention that all members of the second group believed they were speaking to a chatbot.

Going into the experiment, the researchers expected to find that users who had been talking with a ‘chatbot’ would report feeling less comfortable about sharing sensitive information than those who had been talking with a human therapist. Similar differences were expected between the two groups, in relation to perceived smoothness of communication, perceived usefulness, and perceived overall enjoyment. These hypotheses they dubbed ‘H1’, H2’, ‘H3’, and ‘H4’.

The results for each hypothesis were as follows:

Sharing ease

There was no significant statistical difference found between the results of the two groups. However, in interviews conducted by the researchers after the participants’ conversations, one person in the chatbot group reported feeling a lack of empathy on the part of their ‘chatbot interlocutor’.

Smoothness

The chatbot group reported a far lower average conversation smoothness than the human therapist group. The researchers perceived this as demonstrating the difficulties inherent in text-based therapy. Three of the five participants in the chatbot group commented on this issue of smoothness in their interviews, while none in the first group did.

Usefulness

Statistically, both groups’ results were identical. However, all members of the chatbot group ‘commented at least once that a session had been useful’, while only three of the five participants in the human therapist group did so.

Enjoyment

Here is where the researchers’ predictions are most clearly born out. The first group reported enjoying their sessions much more than the chatbot group, according to a Likert-scale questionnaire.

For Bell and his team, these results indicate that chatbot CBT rarely provides a better overall experience for patients than regular CBT, and can sometimes lead to an inferior one. This outcome they attribute to a comparative lack of mutual trust in the patient-chatbot relationship, as well as the limitations of current chatbot technology (the script for their pretend chatbot was written with these limitations in mind).

However, the results of this study are far from conclusive.

First of all, an extremely small sample size was used — just 10 people in all. In addition, the data only give meaningful credence to H2 and H4; perceptions of sharing ease were found to be roughly equal between groups, and perceptions of usefulness scored higher in qualitative measurements among the members of the chatbot group.

As an explanation for the former, it may be that respondents sensing a lack of empathy in the chatbot simultaneously felt more able to open up thanks to its non-judgemental nature. Equally, it may be that the chatbot group’s perceptions of usefulness bears out Darcy’s own emphasis on Woebot being a tool rather than a holistic solution. We might, then, characterise chatbots as useful at best; traditional human therapy can often be enjoyable as well.

Enjoyment and smoothness are extremely important aspects of treatment. For a patient to be honest about their struggles during a session, they must feel at ease, as well as a sense of connection and deep understanding that can perhaps come only from a human. For now, it seems that therapists are safe — a chatbot like Woebot remains just a useful tool.

In the coming years, conversations with chatbots are likely to become increasingly realistic, particularly once the technology allows for true creativity. Eventually, we may reach a point where therapists do find themselves being replaced. Before this happens, we must make sure that Woebot is up to the job.

¹ ‘7 real examples of brands and businesses using chatbots to gain an edge’, Business Insider, 2020: https://www.businessinsider.com/business-chatbot-examples?r=US&IR=T.

² ‘Cleverbot’, accessed January 2021: https://www.cleverbot.com/.

³ ‘Natural Language Processing (NLP)’, SAS, 2020: https://www.sas.com/en_gb/insights/analytics/what-is-natural-language-processing-nlp.html.

⁴ ‘Meet The Woman Behind Woebot, The AI Therapist’, Forbes, 2017: https://www.forbes.com/sites/elizabethharris/2017/12/31/meet-the-woman-behind-woebot-the-ai-therapist/?sh=696cedd43699.

⁵ Homepage, Woebot Health, accessed January 2021: https://woebothealth.com/.

⁶ ‘Technology’, Woebot Health: https://woebothealth.com/technology/.

⁷ In her interview with Forbes, Darcy states that ‘humor is a big part of delivery’ for the Woebot team.

⁸ ‘Hello! We are Drs. Alison Darcy ＆ Athena Robinson […]’, Reddit, 2018: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9j302z/hello_we_are_drs_alison_darcy_athena_robinson_the/.

⁹ ‘“The Woebot will see you now” — the rise of chatbot therapy’, The Washington Post, 2017: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2017/12/03/the-woebot-will-see-you-now-the-rise-of-chatbot-therapy/.

¹⁰ ‘Hello! We are Drs. Alison Darcy ＆ Athena Robinson […]’, Reddit.

¹¹ ‘Frequently asked questions’, Woebot Health: https://woebothealth.com/faqs/; ‘Can Your Phone Be Your Therapist? Young People’s Ethical Perspectives on the Use of Fully Automated Conversational Agents (Chatbots) in Mental Health Support’, Kira Kretzschmar et al, 2019: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1178222619829083.

¹² In April 2020, Woebot Health added COVID-19-specific material to the app in the form of a new feature called ‘Perspectives’. This new support combines traditional CBT with an evidence-based technique called Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT) that helps patients process loss and dramatic life changes (‘News’, Woebot Health: https://woebothealth.com/news/).

¹³ ‘Meet The Woman Behind Woebot, The AI Therapist’, Forbes. For more on this, see ‘Internet-based vs. face-to-face cognitive behavior therapy for psychiatric and somatic disorders: an updated systematic review and meta-analysis’, Per Carlbring et al, 2018: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/16506073.2017.1401115; ‘The Effectiveness of Internet-Based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in Treatment of Psychiatric Disorders’, Vikram Kumar et al, 2017: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5659300/.

¹⁴ ‘7 real examples of brands and businesses using chatbots to gain an edge’, Business Insider.

¹⁵ ‘NHS talking therapies’, NHS, 2018: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/stress-anxiety-depression/free-therapy-or-counselling/.

¹⁶ ‘Frequently asked questions’, Woebot Health. See also ‘Artificial intelligence and mobile apps for mental healthcare: a social informatics perspective’, Alyson Gamble, 2020: https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/AJIM-11-2019-0316/full/html.

¹⁷ ‘Do Mental Health Chatbots Work?’, Healthline, 2018: https://www.healthline.com/health/mental-health/chatbots-reviews.

¹⁸ ‘Perceptions of Chatbots in Therapy’, Samuel Bell et al, 2019: https://advait.org/files/bell_2019_chatbots_therapy.pdf.

¹⁹ ‘Delivering Cognitive Behavior Therapy to Young Adults With Symptoms of Depression and Anxiety Using a Fully Automated Conversational Agent (Woebot): A Randomized Controlled Trial’, Kathleen Kara Fitzpatrick et al, 2017: https://mental.jmir.org/2017/2/e19/.

²⁰ ‘Clinical Results’, Woebot Health: https://woebothealth.com/clinicalresults/.

²¹ Homepage, Woebot Health.

²² ‘How it Works’, Woebot Health: https://woebothealth.com/how-it-works/.

²³ ‘Child advice chatbots fail to spot sexual abuse’, BBC, 2018: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-46507900; ‘Chatbot used by NHS to treat depression failed to act after users reported sexual abuse’, The Telegraph, 2018: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2018/12/11/chatbot-used-nhs-treat-depression-failed-act-users-reported/.

²⁴ ‘Mental health apps’, NHS, accessed January 2021: https://www.nhs.uk/apps-library/category/mental-health/?page=1.

²⁵ ‘Technology’, Woebot Health.

²⁶ ‘Perceptions of Chatbots in Therapy’, Samuel Bell et al.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

---

Meet Woebot, the mental health chatbot changing the face of therapy was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

submitted by /u/henrythemeanBOT [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/Tebai
[link] [comments]

Artificial intelligence (AI) is not new in our world. It has been around since the 1960s. AI is a broad term that refers to computers that perform tasks that require human intelligence. Never before in the history of AI have, we see a surge in its usage as we see in recent times.

The unprecedented surge is currently changing human’s personal and professional lives. With the help of AI, people perform tasks with little effort while corporate businesses leverage AI to complete several complex tasks faster and do more in a short time.

Recent developments in AI include the invention of Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which is the technology that enables people to configure a robot or computer software to imitate and integrate the activities of a human interacting within digital systems to carry out a business process.

RPA is as popular, and it is gradually taking the center stage, especially with the surge in its adaption among corporate businesses.

With AI and RPA, business organizations can quickly transform their operational procedures, achieve better results, scale their business and attain full automation. However, both technologies require rare technical skills — a growing concern for corporate businesses around the world. There is an increasing need for tech professionals who can successfully leverage them.

The Problem of Intelligence

Unlike AI robots which have several physical shapes and structures depending on the task, it is built to perform, RPA is a bot or software that helps you automate regular repetitive tasks and processes that improve itself over a period of usage. As a result, you’ll eliminate potential human errors, reduces turnaround time, and ultimately improve productivity and efficiency.

Today, RPA is taking the spotlight in the tech world because it gives back a reasonably high return on investment. With RPA, you’ll have bots that will carry out several tasks that would require expensive human labor. They also help prevent a drop-in efficiency that tends to occur due to exhaustion or weariness, which is a common disadvantage of human labor. The bots are virtual assistants that carry out repetitive assignments without human intervention.

These bots can complete tasks according to a set of rules defined by an RPA.

They can improve efficiency in various fields like:

• Customer service
• Human resources
• Healthcare
• Finance
• Data entry
• Supply chain management and many more.

However, RPA has a couple of setbacks, scaling up the technology and high hand-holding during the initial rollout.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. Case Study: Building Appointment Booking Chatbot

2. IBM Watson Assistant provides better intent classification than other commercial products according to published study

3. Testing Conversational AI

4. How intelligent and automated conversational systems are driving B2C revenue and growth.

The biggest concern for users — is on scaling up the technology. Companies using this product are forced to purchase multiple bots to perform various tasks. This problem stems from the fact that RPA on its own is not intelligent. An RPA software can only handle limited tasks as its programming allows it to work on structured data only. That means, for every task, the new software will be developed and programmed to help the RPA process the task. Also, there has to be human interaction along the line.

Imagine a fraud detection unit that needed to automate its systems. Without automation, the process would start with an agent doing his analysis and speaking with the clients. At the wrap-up phase, the agent will fill special forms and send emails to the right department regarding his decisions. AI RPA can bridge the gap in a manual intervention during the wrap-up phase, which is tiring, repetitive, and time-consuming.

AI comes in as a technology to bridge the gaps and optimize the RPA’s function. This is because, unlike RPA, AI can execute both rule-based and non-rule-based tasks. By comparison, AI can also work with structured and non-structured data.

Combining both technologies helps your business to achieve what is referred to as Intelligent Automation. In this system, RPA works to automate repetitive tasks, while AI does the thinking job.

What are the advantages?

With these AI and RPA technologies working together for intelligent automation, there are no limits to what you can achieve. You can automate almost all office processes entirely from end to end. Here are some benefits organizations stand to gain from intelligent automation:

1. Speed:

With intelligent automation, you can optimize output by spending less time on menial tasks that are taking valuable time. Handling times will reduce by half, especially when you automate from end to end. Ultimately leading to better customer satisfaction and improved results.

2. Accuracy:

With intelligent automation, there would be fewer errors and more accuracy. That is because the process reduces human interference to the barest minimum. Also, the AI complements the RPA system and removes the possibilities of mistakes in rules application. Hence, data is more accurate, and consequently, data-driven decisions are correct as well.

3. Continuity of Service

Humans always need a break to function optimally. Robots, on the other hand, can work all through the day, non-stop. With Intelligent automation, you can replace humans with AI and have RPA handle the less intelligent parts of the process.

4. Greater Efficiency in processing

In terms of actual savings, intelligent automation has been proven to cut business process costs by anywhere from 25% to 40% on average

5. Control:

With intelligent automation, companies can ramp-up or ramp-down their capacity instantly. Interestingly, this is not as expensive as getting traditional models. With this, the company can adapt to demand fluctuations, so it doesn’t affect staff or customers in a short period of time.

Success Factors for Intelligent Automation

For a system with intelligent automation to succeed, the following must be in place:

· First, you need a goal and a strategy for the process. To come up with these, be sure to carry along all stakeholders in the firm.

· Consider the process that gives the best results. Remember, you are seeking speed and aiming to reduce cost in the long run. So, choose your options along that line.

· You need a team of highly skilled resources to bring your plans to reality.

You need to measure the success of the automation by checking the ROI of this intelligent automation.

The motive behind any business improvement purchase is to maximize profit which can be done either by increasing revenue or reducing running cost.

Revenue and costs, however, are not the only ways to check results. Each organization, depending on its goals, would have different metrics for measuring success. But then, for most companies, doing a pre-and post-automation evaluation usually does the trick.

Are There Risks and Challenges?

Intelligent automation offers endless possibilities and, at the same time, poses some challenges.

One of the most significant risks is the displacement of workers. With automation of any kind comes the loss of jobs for many people whose jobs can be handled by machines.

There is also a risk of exposing sensitive human data over the internet, data stored up could be stolen and used for unprofessional reasons.

Furthermore, among the challenge is the issue of capital. At present, it takes a lot of financial investments in automation. Starting from the design to implementation of automation can cost millions of dollars. Also, the system would require a higher level of maintenance than the regular RPA process.

The low number of skilled professionals in this area limits its reachability. The system, as of today, is still at the development and acceptance stage. Therefore, currently available solutions might not be fit for the needs of a specific area.

Conclusion

In the end, the benefits that come with Intelligent Automation outweigh its challenges by far. Also, some of these problems could even be solved in the long run as the AI system learns from data.

As a business owner, intelligent automation is the best way to scale up and take your business to the next level. You need not hold back on embracing this innovation. As far as you are sure your company can benefit from it, speak with experts, and start adopting it.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

---

AI in Robotic Process Automation was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.