Managing remote teams can be extremely challenging. When team members are scattered in different locations, building a tight connection among team members can be hard.
Tools like Slack are becoming the preferred tool to communicate with teams that are in the office together, as well as remote.
In this article, we’ll discuss 10 best Slack apps and bots to keep your remote team happy and productive.
1. EngageWith
EngageWith is an employee recognition and rewards platform that enriches your company culture. It virtually brings recognition and fun within your Slack and MS Teams workspace. With EngageWith, everyone across your organization can publicly recognize everyone else by giving points that add up to valued rewards (employees can redeem their points).
2. Trivia
Trivia is the new way to connect with your remote team while playing exciting quizzes and remote games on Slack and Microsoft Teams! Get summarised results at the end of every Trivia quiz and find your very own Quizzard!
Giphy app allows you to search from the world’s largest library of animated GIFs, making it easy to find and share them on Slack. Want to display a cat gif? Just typing “/giphy cats” will display a cat GIF in your channel.
4. HeyTaco!
HeyTaco lets you recognize a team member by giving them tacos when they accomplish something great! Then, that teammate can redeem their tacos for custom rewards. It sparks conversations and builds stronger relationships with its fun and unique kindness currency…tacos!
5. TINYpulse
TINYpulse bot is a feedback-based app that encourages the whole team to provide input. Customizable weekly queries that can range from “How valued do you feel at work?” to “Where should we hold the company holiday party?”.
This provides actionable, specific data for executives to reference in decision-making.
6. Zoom for Slack
Zoom for Slack allows you to instantly share video, audio, and screens from any Slack channel or group. From any channel in Slack, you can start an instant meeting by entering the /zoom command.
7. ToDoBot
ToDoBot is a task management app for slack. It assigns tasks during conversations and set due dates. That way, instead of creating a 15-minute task in your project management tool, you can monitor it straight from Slack.
8. Pocket
Pocket for Slack helps you capture and save all of the interesting articles, links, and videos your teammates share in Slack throughout the day — right to Pocket.
9. Monday.com
Sync conversations across both platforms, receive updates, and track changes instantly to ensure everyone is on the same page. Monday enables teams to manage work, meet deadlines, and build a culture of accountability and inclusion.
10. Standuply
Start your day with a Standuply meeting in Slack, to prompt teammates to share what they’re working on, what’s blocking them and what they’ve completed.
To be honest I was never big into chatbots, and I have yet to run into a chatbot that has legitimately solved my customer support issues, but I will likely have to develop a chatbot for my next project at work. I was hoping I could interact with the best chatbot out in the wild, just to get some inspiration as to what the user experience should feel like when done properly.
I know chatbots can have a lot of variety so the chatbot I’m looking for would strictly be handling things like:
Canceling an order
Dispute bill
Payment Plans
Membership upgrades
So far the best chatbot I have seen is Amazon’s. Mainly because it has me specify my order that I’m contacting about before starting the support chat session. However, I’d be curious to get everyone’s input in case there’s something better.
TLDR; What’s the best chat bot encounter you’ve had and what made it so pleasant?
One major pitfall of building chatbots is underestimating the importance of performance. The UI of a chatbot is usually very simple, so it’s easy to forget the complexity behind these virtual assistants. A slow chatbot might be accepted for home projects, but a company can not neglect it. Bad performance is a serious UX killer.
Performance Testing is the key to ensure that your chatbot is responsive under high load. Worst case is maybe a chatbot that does not answer at all, because it was not able to recover after high load caused by clients or some Ddos attack.
Stress Testing
To collect some basic knowledge about the performance of your chatbot we suggest starting with a stress test. Stress testing basically means that we are starting with a small number of parallel users that gets gradually increased during the execution. After some minutes it will answer two fundamental questions:
First, the main output is how many parallel users can be served without slowing down the system. Determining which are the slow parts requires of course human interaction.
Second, but not less important output can be detected errors. Usually it is the first production-near scenario for a chatbot experiencing heavy load.
Let’s see some more real life examples…
First Stress Test
By default all parallel users are having a very simple conversation with the bot, saying just ‘hello’ for example. They wait for an answer and repeat the conversation until the end of the test is reached. Any response coming from the chatbot is accepted. So if the chatbot answers sometimes with ‘Hello User’ sometimes with ‘I don’t understand’, it has no impact on the performance results. The main goal here is to get an answer, while a http error code or lack of answer is interpreted as failure of course.
In order to start a Stress Test, we have to select the “Performance Tests” tab in our Test Project, and choose Stress Test there.
The duration can be 1 minute. In terms of parallel users lets use 5 for starting, 1000 for ending. (You can put 1000 there by editing the field directly).
“Required percentage of Successful Users?” can be 0 percent, because we don’t want to stop the test on failed responses (at the moment).
I have two goals with these settings; getting a first impression about the max parallel users the chatbot is able to serve, and discovering how the chatbot breaks on extreme load. In production your chatbot could have much more load than expected, so you have to test it.
The first chart in the stress test results shows that there were errors.
We see that the bot can easily handle 5 parallel users. But on the next step, when the number of parallel users was increased to over 200, the chatbot started to fail already.
For more insights into the failures you can download a detailed report.
This report contains all errors detected by Botium Box. The types of failures are:
Timeout (Chatbot does not answer at all, or too slow)
Invalid response (API limit reached, server down, invalid credentials)
Response with unexpected content (We send ‘hi’, and expect ‘Hello!’, but the chatbot answers with ‘Sorry some error detected come back later!’)
In my case there is just one kind of error in the report:
2168/Line 6: error waiting for bot — Bot did not respond within 10000ms
After 10s Botium Box has given up waiting for the response. The chatbot answer time was over the limit, or did not answer at all. Slowing down is common on extreme loads, but receiving no answer is more critical, that we can’t ignore.
By checking the Response Times Chart in our stress test results, I notice that the chatbot is just too slow. The response time is increasing until it reaches 10s and most of the responses are failed. Next step is now to check chatbot side metrics/logs or increase the timeout in Botium Box. For the sake of simplicity I believe that my impression is correct.
The first stress test proved to me that the maximum number of parallel users is somewhere at 200 and on heavy loads the chatbot won’t break but slow down significantly.
Our first stress test had very wide parameters. I had two goals there, getting some raw results about the max parallel users and checking what happens on extreme loads. With the second stress test I want to refine the number of max parallel users.
I set the test step duration to 2 sec meaning that every two seconds Botium Box will increase the number of parallel users. The minimum users to 150 and the number of maximum users to 300. Based on these parameters Botium Box will add every 2 seconds 14 new parallel users till it ends up with 300 after twelve steps.
We can set the ‘Required percentage of Successful Users’ to 95%. Our goal now is not to go beyond the limit of the chatbot, but about the normal usage. I already expect the test to fail because of too many timeouts. The question is when will it fail (at which number of parallel users).
After the test is finished I see that it failed as expected:
To be sure I check the Failed Convos report. There are the same timeout errors as we had in the first test and as I expected. That’s good.
Next step is checking the charts on the stress test results:
In the first step (150 parallel users) there are no errors (first chart) and the average response time is 5s (second chart). The second step (150 + 14 parallel users) looks the same. And there I have already found the limit of my chatbot. I don’t want failures (responses above 10s) or average response times above 5s.
The third step is very interesting. The average response time is increasing. The number of users is not changing in a test step, we expect some linear response time as before. And checking the first chart we see that there were some errors.
In the last step we can see the test tear down phase in chart 3. The emulated users did not start any new conversations, just finished the current one.
Back to the third step. The chatbot seems to be overloaded getting more requests than it is able to process. Another finding is that in the teardown phase the response time does not recover. Probably because the response times chart is cut at 10s due to the timeout used by Botium Box. I suppose there is fallback in the response times, but it is still above 10s, so we don’t see it.
If overloading is not the cause, then maybe something is sucked there (memory leak). But I’m pretty sure it’s overloading because it’s too progressive to be something else. I will prove that in my next article.
Summary
Based on the two tests done I have determined the limits of my chatbot and I know how it behaves on extreme load. Based on those KPIs I can decide for the next actions. Depending on my business requirements and the chatbot’s architecture there are many options. Fixing existing bugs, doing some horizontal/vertical scaling or applying necessary code/architecture changes to name a few.
Next
Using just Stress Testing can be already sufficient if your chatbot is based on an external service. In more complex cases, if you own the chatbot architecture at least partially, it’s strongly recommended to dig deeper. In my next article I will cover (memory) leaks, API limits, Ddos attack and Performance Monitoring.
Transformer models have taken the world of Natural Language Processing by storm. This post is intended to build a simple QnA chatbot. We will first build a knowledge base based on the training set. We will use distilbert-base-uncased transformer model to calculate the sentence vectors for each of the sentences present in the knowledge base. These sentence vectors capture the context of the sentence and in turn, help to understand the sentence.
We will store the sentence vectors in Mongo Database. When the user sends a query, a vector representation of the query will be calculated. Using the cosine similarity, we will find the sentence vector from the knowledge base that matches the most with the input query vector. The intent of the matching sentence will be recognized and the output will be displayed to the user based on the responses mentioned for that intent.
Distilbert-base-uncased
DistilBERT is a small, fast, cheap, and light Transformer model trained by distilling BERT base. It has 40% fewer parameters than Bert-base-uncased, runs 60% faster while preserving over 95% of BERT’s performances as measured on the GLUE language understanding benchmark.
Pytorch
PyTorch is an open-source machine learning library based on the Torch library, used for applications such as computer vision and natural language processing, primarily developed by Facebook’s AI Research lab (FAIR). It is free and open-source software.
PyTorch provides two high-level features: 1. Tensor computing (like NumPy) with strong acceleration via graphics processing units (GPU) 2. Automatic differentiation system
Generate sentence embeddings for the sentences in the dataset
def get_embedding(sents): # initialize dictionary: stores tokenized sentences token = {‘input_ids’: [], ‘attention_mask’: []} for sentence in sents: # encode each sentence, append to dictionary new_token = tokenizer(sentence, max_length=128, truncation=True, padding=’max_length’, return_tensors=’pt’) token[‘input_ids’].append(new_token[‘input_ids’][0]) token[‘attention_mask’].append(new_token[‘attention_mask’][0])
# reformat list of tensors to single tensor # combining a list of tensors into a 2D single tensor token[‘input_ids’] = torch.stack(token[‘input_ids’]) token[‘attention_mask’] = torch.stack(token[‘attention_mask’])
# convert from PyTorch tensor to numpy array mean_pooled = mean_pooled.detach().numpy() return mean_pooled
Generate Embeddings
mean_pooled = get_embedding(sentences)
Embeddings shape
Attention mask shape
Mask shape
Mask Embeddings shape
Summed shape
Summed
Summed mask shape
Mean pooled
Mean pooled shape
Storing the results
result = [] for i in range(len(sents)): d = {} d[‘Text’] = sents[i] d[‘Intent’] = l_intent[i] d[‘Embedding’] = mean_pooled[i].tolist() result.append(d)
When the user enters the query: 1. Calculate the sentence vector of the query 2. Identify the most matching sentence from the knowledge base using cosine similarity
for rec in collection.find(): question.append(rec[‘Text’]) intent.append(rec[‘Intent’]) cos_sim = cosine_similarity([mean_pooled[0]], [np.fromiter(rec[‘Embedding’], dtype=np.float32)]) similarity.append(cos_sim)
index = np.argmax(similarity) recognized_intent = intent[index] return recognized_intent
Intents JSON file
Here we set up an intents JSON file that defines the intentions of the chatbot user. For example: A user may wish to know the name of our chatbot; therefore, we have created an intent called name. A user may wish to know the age of our chatbot; therefore, we have created an intent called age.
In this chatbot, we have used 5 intents: name, age, date, greeting, and goodbye. When the user enters any input, the intent will be recognized by the bot.
Within this intents JSON file, alongside each intents tag, there are responses. For our chatbot, once the intent is recognized the response will be randomly selected from the static set of responses associated with each intent.
# used a dictionary to represent an intents JSON
data = {"intents": [ {"tag": "greeting", "responses": ["Howdy Partner!", "Hello", "How are you doing?", "Greetings!", "How do you do?"], }, {"tag": "age", "responses": ["I am 24 years old", "I was born in 1996", "My birthday is July 3rd and I was born in 1996", "03/07/1996"] }, {"tag": "date", "responses": ["I am available all week", "I don't have any plans", "I am not busy"] }, {"tag": "name", "responses": ["My name is Kippi", "I'm Kippi", "Kippi"] }, {"tag": "goodbye", "responses": ["It was nice speaking to you", "See you later", "Speak soon!"] } ]}
Generate the response to the user’s query
def get_response(intent): for i in data[‘intents’]: if i[“tag”] == intent: result = random.choice(i[“responses”]) break return result
Now its time to test our chatbot
recognized_intent = calculate_similarity('Hello my friend') print(f"Intent: {recognized_intent}") print(f"Response: {get_response(recognized_intent)}")
recognized_intent = calculate_similarity('What do people call you') print(f"Intent: {recognized_intent}") print(f"Response: {get_response(recognized_intent)}")
recognized_intent = calculate_similarity(‘How old are you’) print(f”Intent: {recognized_intent}”) print(f”Response: {get_response(recognized_intent)}”)
recognized_intent = calculate_similarity(‘what are your weekend plans’) print(f”Intent: {recognized_intent}”) print(f”Response: {get_response(recognized_intent)}”)
recognized_intent = calculate_similarity(‘Catch you later’) print(f”Intent: {recognized_intent}”) print(f”Response: {get_response(recognized_intent)}”)
In IFTTT you can create an applet that connects to your Google account and gets invoked when you say certain phrases directly to the Assistant. I’ve worked on dialogflow chat bots with some complex interactions and fulfilment services but it was always for in house projects so I never really go to a point where my bots where being used in a B2C manner. So for these bots you’d have to say something like “Talk to xyz” to invoke your agent and then you could continue talking and interacting with the agent.
I’d like to recreate what IFTTT does with Google assistant now, so that I can have users sign up once and then use my chat bot directly from their Assistant device, without the need to explicitly trigger the agent. Can someone please tell me how this works or point me towards where I need to research on this?
Artificial Intelligence is rapidly getting into the workflow of many businesses across various industries. Due to the advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Natural Language Understanding (NLU), and Deep Learning (DL), we are now able to develop technologies capable of imitating human-like interactions which include recognizing speech, as well as text.
In this article, we are going to build a Conversational Chatbot app using Transformer (microsoft/DialoGPT-medium model), streamlit.
Transformer Model
A State-of-the-Art Large-scale Pretrained Response generation model (DialoGPT)
DialoGPT is a SOTA large-scale pretrained dialogue response generation model for multiturn conversations. The human evaluation results indicate that the response generated from DialoGPT is comparable to human response quality under a single-turn conversation Turing test. The model is trained on 147M multi-turn dialogue from Reddit discussion thread.
Streamlit
Streamlit is an open-source Python library
Streamlit makes it easy to create and share beautiful, custom web apps for machine learning and data science. In just a few minutes we can build and deploy powerful data apps.
Importing the libraries that are required to perform operations on the dataset.
import streamlit as st import torch import transformers from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
Load the tokenizer and model
Streamlit cache, caches the tokenizer and the model. This avoids reloading of the tokenizer and the model and thus improving the performance.
@st.cache(hash_funcs={transformers.models.gpt2.tokenization_gpt2_fast.GPT2TokenizerFast: hash}, suppress_st_warning=True) def load_data(): tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("microsoft/DialoGPT-medium") model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained("microsoft/DialoGPT-medium") return tokenizer, model
tokenizer, model = load_data()
Set up the streamlit
In the session state of streamlit, we are storing the below items:
chat_history_ids: Stores the conversations made by the user in that session.
count: Count of conversations. It was observed that the model was not giving good results after 5 sequential conversations. So we use this counter to clear the chat history.
old_response: Stores the previous response by the model. Sometimes the model generates the same response as the previous, using this variable we can track such duplicate responses and we can regenerate the model response.
st.write("Welcome to the Chatbot. I am still learning, please be patient")
input = st.text_input('User:')
if 'count' not in st.session_state or st.session_state.count == 6: st.session_state.count = 0 st.session_state.chat_history_ids = None st.session_state.old_response = '' else: st.session_state.count += 1
Tokenizing the user input and returning the tensor output
Digital era has always amused us with its new innovative ideas and inventions. Digital India is a dream of every Indian and that dream has almost come true. It was only successful by applying artificial intelligence and one of them is AI virtual agents as contact center solutions that are being introduced in every field.
Virtual assistant call center service has played an essential role in customer servicing by assisting clients through interacting across various channels including emails, webchats, social media, etc., and has led intelligent virtual assistance to a new level.
Having said that, contact centers have always been run by human beings and there are unforeseen mistakes and risks which any company cannot afford to have. In this competitive world, we expect every work or job to be done perfectly and with less cost consumption.
This has been possible only through one medium is Virtual agents. Are you wondering how it works, what are its benefits? Then let us not wait any further. Let’s get started.
Firstly, what is a supercharging contact center?
As said earlier, supercharging contact centers which are also called e-contact centers are one-point contact areas where all customer interaction channels are managed with the help of CRM (Customer Relationship Manager). Basically, it includes one or more call centers integrated with CRM.
As the business grows, contact center solutions become quite important to achieve utmost customer satisfaction. To help the users with their queries and other issues related to the product, a contact center solution is very essential for a company’s growth. It allows us to maintain retention in the company for a longer time period.
What are virtual agents?
Virtual agents are a set of programs that have certain rules and support of Conversation AI in order to assist with customer service through various mediums. These virtual agents can help us through chatbots, emails, voice bots, or even interactive voice response systems.
In simple words, virtual agents can also be called digital assistants which is mainly helpful for huge organizations dealing with enormous amounts of customers or internal employees. Unlike other agents such as chatbots, virtual agents can communicate through any medium available.
Basically, virtual agents or virtual assistant call center services are pre-programmed or scripted products in specific ways to understand human language at ease. Upon request of human virtual agents receive the language and convert it to machine language with the help of ASR. Virtual agents will identify keywords and search for solutions.
Later the extracted solution will be converted into human-understandable language with the help of Dialog conversation. Thus, virtual agents can be effective and efficient.
How will supercharging contact centers with virtual agents be beneficial?
Virtual agents can provide numerous benefits to contact centers AI. Below are the following benefits where one can focus on
1. Improves customer experience
Digital India has made us more comfortable with technology than before. Hence, no one wants to wait in the queue to be answered and can resolve on their own with little help available. Virtual agents, with their unique way of approach, help the customers to reach for needed solutions in a short span of time.
Even though virtual agents provide minimal and only needed solutions, they are much more effective and useful solutions for our problems compared to other methods.
2. Available round the clock
We may not expect human beings to work 24/7 as there is a physical and mental limit, but with virtual agents, this is possible seven days a week. In this busy world, users do not have time to check in to companies’ websites to search for solutions. Through AI virtual agents nothing is stopping us by assisting our customers and getting utmost satisfaction.
3. Efficient data gathering
Every time a customer interacts with virtual data, the information shared is different from others. Virtual agent saves information in the backend of the system which is later used for fetching users’ data indeed, to upgrade or update the user system, better decision-making, etc.
From all the questions or the issues faced by virtual agents, managers or superiors can check the pattern or frequently asked questions so that solutions can be found out easily. It also helps us find out where exactly an issue is and at which level customers are facing this difficulty and at which location very easily.
4. Benefits to human agents
During festive seasons or any offers, occasions there will be high volumes of calls or inquiries and at this high rate of calls, there is a lot of pressure which results in not answering every customer efficiently. Thus, virtual agents are used to interact effectively. Here, we have to note that virtual agents are not here to replace contact centers but to assist.
Hence, while a virtual AI assistant for contact center agents can answer commonly asked questions that are still difficult for customers to figure out, contact centers can face challenging tasks which together result in inefficient customer service virtual assistants.
5. Advanced AI
Contact center virtual agents are a real boon to contact centers as AI is built with the capability to upgrade or to correct itself on its own. With every interaction with customers, virtual agent service learns more and more every day. This takes the weight of the developer to update virtual agents frequently.
With every interaction with users, virtual agents assure us that they have the potentiality to satisfy customers with their needs at ease.
6. Enhanced lead generation
As these intelligent virtual agents can gather any amount of information in a fraction of seconds and store it, they are very suitable for interacting with clients. Intelligent Virtual assistance understands the customer’s needs and can assist them at multiple levels and in a wider area compared to contact centers.
Conclusion
Considering all the above points, every contact center virtual agent can perform better with utmost user satisfaction and maintain 100% retention. This is the most effective and easiest way to resolve customer issues with very little cost consumption.
