Category: Chat

  • A quick guide on conversation management and how to build a chatbot?

    Employee 1: Don’t you think we need a chatbot?

    Employee 2: Do we?

    Employee 1: Well, it’s trending and every other company has one.

    Employee 2: Is it really that important? Do we really have the budget and resources to manage it?

    If you have had this conversation with someone “You are not alone”

    The pressure to stand out and be relevant in today’s market is real

    And so is the “shiny object syndrome”

    Taking these decisions can get overwhelming and finalizing the tech stack is usually very hard

    But we’ve got you!

    Let’s demystify everything Chatbot!

    First, let’s understand

    What is conversation management?

    “Conversation + Management”

    The conversation is a talk between two people, just like I am talking to you…Yes, YOU!

    Management is organizing anything to achieve a goal; just like I have organized this article in sections to help you understand.

    When these 2 are put together they simply mean “Organizing talk between people to achieve a goal.”

    Now all this is great but how does one achieve conversation management in a business to get results. That’s where AI came into the picture and from there emerged Chatbots.

    In this article we will go through the following:

    • What is a chatbot?
    • How many types of chatbots are there?
    • Why do we need chatbots?
    • Are chatbots the solution to seamless customer service?
    • What is chatbot architecture?
    • How to build a chatbot?
    • Which platform to choose for building chatbots?
    • Why Quickwork Chat?

    What is a chatbot?

    A chatbot is an array of code built to perform certain actions without the need for human assistance. This is an artificial intelligence software that can chat/talk/type with you just like a human would using Natual Language Processing (NLP) as your mobile assistants like Siri or Google, through an AI-powered speaker as Alexa, as a website chat widget, and much more.

    What kinds of chatbots are there?

    We primarily deal with 2 types of chatbots in our daily lives:

    1. FAQ Bot: Now do you remember chatting on a website and being presented with a list of options to choose from? Well, the options you see are nothing but frequently asked questions that the bot has been pre-fed with along with the responses. These types of chatbots are very useful to establish trust and authority as a thought leader with your customers. FAQ chatbots are a great way for a business to enhance customer experience while saving time and money on the dedicated resource to cater to these queries plus it is available 24/7.
    2. NLP or Contextual Bot: Now try to remember your conversation with a food delivery chatbot? Did it remember what you had ordered last? Did it ask you to just repeat your order instead of asking you to again choose from the menu? These are NLP Bots, which utilizes Machine learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to learn and grow with every conversation. These capabilities allow them to provide customers with a more natural and personalized experience. It’s just like talking to a human agent.

    Trending Bot Articles:

    1. How Conversational AI can Automate Customer Service

    2. Automated vs Live Chats: What will the Future of Customer Service Look Like?

    3. Chatbots As Medical Assistants In COVID-19 Pandemic

    4. Chatbot Vs. Intelligent Virtual Assistant — What’s the difference & Why Care?

    Are chatbots the solution to seamless customer service?

    Now contrary to popular belief chatbots/chat robots are not our enemies or going to eat up our jobs. Chatbots are not only proving to be the way to provide enhanced customer support but also cost-effective and enabling brands to build trust, retain and engage customers.

    Everyone has a voice and the power to share their opinion everywhere online. Social media is now a powerful way for brands to communicate with customers. Even from pre-sales to post-sales, your customers can have a million questions on their minds, with little patience to get them resolved.

    In today’s complex, high-tech world, customers expect reliable, responsive customer service. In fact, according to a report by Valero, we can’t afford to wait more than a minute to get answers to our questions. Automation can help you improve your customer interactions and provide customers with an immediate solution.

    Automated chatbots: The solution to seamless customer service

    1. Operational efficiency: Chatbots help in streamlining the customer service cycle and respond to customer queries in real-time. Thus reducing the call volumes and improves the TAT of customer queries.
    2. Customer experience: ‘Customer is the king’- this phrase stands true to its last letter in today’s world where everything is customer-centric. And let’s be honest even when we are on the other side of things we hate waiting for a response and want our queries resolved immediately and if they aren’t catered to as per our schedule or as promised we either lash out on them or share negative reviews on social media.
    3. Scale-up operations: Now imagine a turnout of even 20 customers at the same time and you have a customer support team of 5. What is this going to do? The 15 waiting in line for something super urgent are definitely not going to be happy and some of them might have a very simple query that only requires 30 seconds but since there are only 5 of you and 20 of them, they will have to wait for their turn. Now imagine having a chatbot catering to 60–70% of these queries and only the rest very critical ones being passed over to the customer support agent. This not only increases productivity but also the quality of interactions.

    Chatbot architecture:

    Chatbot architecture is what brings the chatbot to life. The usability and context of business operations is the deciding factor of how much architecture of the chatbot would change.

    Key components of a conversational chatbot architecture:

    • Environment
    • Question and Answer System
    • Plugins/Components
    • Node Server / Traffic Server
    • Front-end Systems

    Now you might say all of this is great but how to build a chatbot? How do I know which platform to use? Isn’t it expensive and when I do will not have to spend a lot of my time and effort on managing the conversations?

    Let’s start with the platform:

    On a real-time iPaaS like Quickwork Journey Builder, you can build a workflow and connect your messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Quickwork Chat, etc. to create any type of chatbot within no time.

    Here’s a demo on how to build a chatbot from scratch on WhatsApp:

    You can also visit our Youtube page for more such videos on how to create a chatbot: https://www.youtube.com/c/Quickwork/

    Now you must be thinking, I have built these automated chatbots how do I manage these conversations that are going to come my way, how do I assign these conversations to my human agents after I deploy these automated chatbots?

    Enters, Quickwork Chat:

    Quickwork Chat is a messaging platform that creates awesome and best-suited virtual assistants and human-agent services for you. From FAQ bots, social messaging, and quick reply bots to context enabled chatbots, Quickwork Chat is the most reliable and efficient to serve the assistant service for your customers seamlessly.

    The chatbots — multi-lingual in nature — create a live user experience and help answer queries using AI in real-time.

    Quickwork Chat features:

    Introduction to Quickwork Chat GUI:

    Combine Quickwork Journey Builder with Quickwork Chat and you get a combination of automated chatbots and a conversation manager for effective customer service.

    On Quickwork Journey Builder you can build automated chatbots on messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, etc., and then connect them with Quickwork Chat to bring in that human support that your customers need.

    The Multichannel feature allows admins and agents to communicate with customers available on any of the above-mentioned messaging platforms and enables them to view all the conversations in real-time on a single dashboard.

    On Quickwork chat you can also build a live chat website widget and manage its conversations, Here’s a quick 2-minute tutorial on how to build a chatbot for a website:

    You might be more concerned about getting started than about its functioning. You don’t need to worry because Quickwork provides customized solutions for companies that want to use chatbots as an automated customer service tool. With our team of experts, we can integrate your chatbot into a web portal or an app, and program it with natural language processing and natural language understanding capabilities.

    Once live, the chatbots look and act as an integral part of your online business. In addition to the great visual appeal and features that Quickwork Chat offers, it provides a lot of value.

    You can upload images, files, videos, audio, locations, and more. You can also share messages to provide customers instant answers to their questions through Quickwork Chats’ messaging system. With an easy-to-use conversational interface and a bot-to-human agent hand-off feature, Quickwork Chat makes it easy for businesses to engage customers when they need it most.

    Conclusion:

    Chatbots are the most modern way of communicating with customers. Using any kind of chat app, you can reach thousands of customers by speaking to them directly. How many times have you been checking the comments left on your Facebook page or Instagram? If you find yourself scrolling through pages of hateful remarks, there’s a really easy way to combat them. Chatbots will even monitor your online reputation and help you to keep track of the comments you’re receiving.

    Keeping track of customer queries and building a reliable, seamless method for resolution is key to innovation in the field of customer service.

    An integrated customer service platform provides helpful information and a smooth path for customers to explore your offerings. An intelligent customer experience can turn your customers into advocates of your products and services.

    If you want to know more about chatbots and how they can help your organization don’t think much just…

    Schedule Demo

    Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !


    A quick guide on conversation management and how to build a chatbot? was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

  • Step by step guide to building a Facebook chatbot without any coding.

    What is a Facebook Chatbot?

    A chatbot is an AI conversational program that you can use to chat with your customers/visitors on your behalf with pre-programmed responses. The conversation happens on Facebook-based platforms like Messenger. It aims at helping users with the necessary support in seconds.

    While we have understood what these chatbots are. Now we also need to know how companies are using chatbots on Facebook to improve their social strategy.

    How To Use Facebook Messenger Chatbots?

    Using a facebook chatbot to assist marketing

    With the availability of chatbots on Facebook, one can use such chatbots to generate leads via advertising. The basic idea of these chatbots is to automate the interactions and assist the target users with the requisite information. Before the availability of such chatbots, we often failed to respond to our prospects in real-time and engage them. Now this challenge seems to be solved.

    Improve your customers journey

    Today’s Facebook chatbots have the capabilities to assist the shopping journeys. With several functionalities in areas of security, rich media messaging, and FAQ-based automation, assisted service has become a reality. This can become the ultimate reason to use chatbots for every shop owner. This can make the social buying journey a lot easier and meaningful too.

    Improving your brand awareness

    One can start initiating an active conversation the moment visits your profile page. Before these messenger chatbots, it was always a passive method of communication. We always had users who often looked for something and closed the tab quickly if they didn’t find it at once. Now expect to have a fruitful discussion with all your relevant visitors, and you can initiate the conversation too.

    While you have understood the usage of your chatbot, it is essential to know what to keep in mind while writing chatbot messages. This is one of the most critical steps in building a Facebook chatbot.

    Facebook Messenger Chatbot Best Practices

    The objective of every customer support team is to have a list of super-effective messages. Here are some of the best tips we have got from some of the best customer support professionals.

    Don’t overdo it with the text

    The bot should never have more than messages without taking input from the user. It is good to respond even with humor sometimes but has to be a two-way communication at all times. So make sure you have a conversation with the visitor and not an email like a conversation.

    Use emojis as required

    Try to have less formal communication with your visitor as they are on a social platform like Facebook with you. Adding emojis can make their experience better and a lot friendlier. It will make the conversation shorter and with fewer words too.

    Use breaks between messages

    Avoid using large blocks of text or swamping users with too many messages right on their visit or raising a query. It is crucial to have a human-like conversation at all points in time. In case you find it’s getting complicated, always have the option for the users to switch to human-bot handoff.

    Include smart messages

    As mentioned above, having a more authentic conversation is supercritical. So with rich messaging, buttons, images, GIFs, and videos, you can add humor to your bot and engage your audience for a longer time.

    Always have an option for a user to exit or human handoff

    It may happen that your user is not ready to speak to the bot for long. Instead of forcing her, you can always call for real human interaction. The easiest way to do so will be to have the same in the quick menu.

    Trending Bot Articles:

    1. How Conversational AI can Automate Customer Service

    2. Automated vs Live Chats: What will the Future of Customer Service Look Like?

    3. Chatbots As Medical Assistants In COVID-19 Pandemic

    4. Chatbot Vs. Intelligent Virtual Assistant — What’s the difference & Why Care?

    How To Create A Facebook Chatbot?

    Step 1: Building your chatbot

    • Sign up for Kompose, a GUI bot builder based on natural language conversations for Human-Computer interaction. You don’t need any coding skills to master Kompose. It has a simple, intuitive, and easy-to-use interface. Sign up here.
    • Go to the Bot integrations section and use the “Create a Bot” option to start creating one.
    • Name your bot, set its language (as Kompose supports most used languages), and click save.
    • Create your first welcome message and embed Texts, Buttons, Images, or other rich media types.
    • Create answers for the bot. Define the intent that is possible and mention the phrases that you expect will trigger the communication. With time your bot will learn.
    • If you don’t want to create your chatbot from scratch, you can use one of the available chatbot templates also.

    One can continue to improve the chatbot with time by adding more phrases with time and defined buttons.
    For a quick understanding, have a look-

    Step 2: Integrating facebook with kommunicate

    • Visit the integration section and click on Facebook
    • Once you click on Settings, a pop-up will come that requires you to login on to your Facebook fan page.
    • Login our your Facebook account from the admin account and complete the process.
    • Once your integration is complete, you will be able to see the success message as mentioned below.

    Step 3: Testing your kommunicate bot in facebook

    Kommunicate has successfully integrated with Facebook, so you can start sending messages to your Facebook Page. The messages will also be sent to your Kommunicate dashboard, and the integrated chatbot will begin replying to the same.

    This how it will look on the Kommunicate Dashboard.

    This article was originally published here.

    Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !


    Step by step guide to building a Facebook chatbot without any coding. was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

  • Top 8 eCommerce Trends in 2021 emerging amid the COVID-19 Pandemic

    The COVID-19 pandemic is the first major global health crisis we’ve had in over 100 years and saying businesses were unprepared would be an understatement. Almost every single industry has faced major losses and lost months and even years’ of growth — but not all. While industries like tourism and aviation were hit particularly hard, some have thrived due to lockdowns and quarantine measures — eCommerce is one such industry.

    According to the eCommerce Trends 2021 SearchNode Survey Report

    A major shift in consumer habits and shopping trends in favor of eCommerce was already in progress for years but 2020 was the equivalent of a fast-forward button for eCommerce growth. According to a recent report published by Adobe, eCommerce sales increased by 77% in 2020 and reached sales levels that were expected between 2024–26.

    The New Normal: Top 8 eCommerce Trends in 2021

    1. Rapid eCommerce growth will deaccelerate but not by much

    One of the main reasons eCommerce growth was accelerated to such an extent was the mandatory lockdowns and quarantines placed all over the world. With brick-and-mortar stores all shuttered, consumers had no choice but to order online — and they did, in quite large numbers. But recovery measures have already begun in 2021 and soon brick-and-mortar stores will start servicing customers again, deaccelerating the rapid growth but not significantly.

    Key Takeaway: The convenience of online shopping isn’t going to change and an increasing number of people will continue shopping online, albeit not at the same levels as 2020. This is an important trend for eCommerce businesses for two reasons. First, to avoid overestimating the demand and be left with unsold goods, especially during the holiday seasons. Second, to avoid underestimating the demand and have no stock. Additionally, predictive analysis and demand visibility will play a big role in ensuring that we do not have supply problems like businesses did in 2020. Speaking of which…

    2. Investment into supply chain visibility

    2020 was full of uncertainty and nowhere was it more apparent than in the supply chain industry. The supply chain industry has been going through a period of relatively stable growth (post-2011), and as a result, most supply chain companies did not invest in the required technologies, predicting demand using methods like the time series model (which look back to predict demand). Unfortunately, in uncertain periods like this, traditional prediction methods (such as time series models) are not accurate.

    eCommerce Trend 2: Investment into Supply Chain Visibility

    Key Takeaway: A shift towards newer technologies such as predictive analysis and big data analytics is expected to improve visibility. For eCommerce businesses, this means that they too would have to start working towards modernizing inventory and order management systems to improve integration with supply chain partners and in order to cope with market shocks and uncertainty.

    Additionally, eCommerce businesses are also highly likely to begin diversifying their supply chain options to avoid supply chain bottlenecks and also mitigate overall volatility in the industry.

    Trending Bot Articles:

    1. How Conversational AI can Automate Customer Service

    2. Automated vs Live Chats: What will the Future of Customer Service Look Like?

    3. Chatbots As Medical Assistants In COVID-19 Pandemic

    4. Chatbot Vs. Intelligent Virtual Assistant — What’s the difference & Why Care?

    3. Mobile shopping will continue to rise

    The mobile platform has been responsible for the majority of online shopping since 2017 and its market share is expected to expand to an even higher 79%. Additionally, online shopping trends on mobile applications and mobile web browsers are slightly different. For instance, conversion rates on applications outperform that of mobile web browsers by 157% — which is a huge gain. This means that if you don’t already have a mobile application for your services, get one. More than 8 in 10 shoppers prefer using a mobile app over a mobile website. However, 25% of consumers still use mobile web for online shopping so it needs attention as well.

    Secondly, businesses need to ensure that their mobile user experience is fast, clean, and reliable. A slow mobile application is a guaranteed way to lose sales. And finally, smartphone applications are a great way of maintaining a constant and direct line of communication with your customers. Furthermore, messaging platforms including Facebook Messenger and even SMS are now a viable sales platform as both support business messaging and sales features that allow customers to browse through products and services and even place orders directly from their messaging app of choice.

    Online Shopping Trends on Mobile Applications

    Other online shopping trends on the mobile platform include advertisement, loyalty programs, and even customer service using tools such as AI chatbots.

    4. The rise of remote working

    The global health crisis forced businesses to adopt new practices and evolve their business models in many ways, including shifting from office work to remote work. However, there are numerous benefits of remote working ranging from cost savings to increased morale, which means that this practice is one of the few that will almost certainly outlive the pandemic. This will lead to a new category of demand from consumers that are now working from home — and a new opportunity for eCommerce businesses.

    This is going to create numerous new needs that need to be fulfilled, from the quality of life (QoL) remote working products to home improvement products. Additionally, this will also change the timings during which consumers are most active on social media, which is important for your social media campaigns. Furthermore, you may notice an increase in demand for home delivery and even pick-up services, depending on your industry. eCommerce businesses in the food and grocery industries, in particular, will experience this as consumers may not be able to pick up groceries/takeout as often as they used to due to remote working schedules.

    5. Catering to new demographics

    The increase in eCommerce sales wasn’t driven by frequent online shoppers alone but also by an increase in adoption rates by demographics that traditionally preferred offline shopping. One of the key demographics is Generation X and Boomers (40 and older). Like everyone else, these groups shifted to eCommerce because of quarantines and lockdowns but even after the pandemic passes, a large percentage of this demographic plans on continuing shopping online. In fact, 1/3rd of the consumers aged 65 and over plan on increasing their online spending. This means that eCommerce businesses also need to take into consideration this group.

    eCommerce Trend 5: Catering to New Demographics

    Following are some of the areas of eCommerce operations that may need attention:

    • App layout: A far too complicated app layout might be off-putting to the older shoppers. However, workarounds such as a navigation bar, search option, or shopping assistant can be implemented instead of a complete redesign.
    • Accessibility options: Depending on where you live, accessibility options might already be mandatory but even if they’re not, features such as text-to-speech or speech-to-text can be beneficial for not just senior citizens but to everyone.
    • Advertisement: Effective advertisement is a great way of connecting to a new demographic and this case isn’t an exception.

    They’ll be numerous other things that may require changes such as copywriting (taglines, descriptions, overall messages), graphics, and (preferably 24/7) customer support.

    6. Change in purchasing power

    In just a single year, almost everyone’s lives have changed significantly, and not all of it has been for the better. As a result, the purchasing power of the vast majority of consumers has reduced. Even in countries with limited job loss, people will limit their expenditure due to economic uncertainty. Does this mean that eCommerce businesses must lower their selling prices? Not exactly.

    Instead of slashing prices (and potentially devaluing brand image), businesses need to rethink their customer proposition and ensure that the new message is aligned with the current market trends and preferences. For instance, most of us are now more health-conscious and as a result, it’s a smart business move to emphasize the lifestyle and health benefits of your products/services.

    One industry that has been and will continue to be an exception to this trend is the luxury goods industry.

    7. Personalization at scale

    Personalization is always appreciated, in fact, more than 50% of online shoppers rate a personalized shopping experience as important. But when serving hundreds of thousands of customers, making even small changes becomes difficult. But that’s changing as new technologies personalization at scale not only possible but also financially feasible.

    Technology Trends Transforming eCommerce Personalization

    One of the most popular technology in this sphere is conversational AI which brings cutting-edge AI and big data analytics to traditional customer service. The premise is simple: almost every business today is collecting terabytes on terabytes of data on their customers but only some businesses are leveraging that information for loyalty programs and business messaging. the majority of the businesses are unable to fully utilize their data. This is where AI comes in. By training computers, data scientists enable a piece of software to:

    • engage consumers in personalized conversations
    • answer complex questions in a surprisingly detailed manner
    • enroll new customers into loyalty programs and manage existing customers
    • send personalized reminders and recommendations based on their previous shopping habits

    The capabilities of this technology allow companies to innovate and find new ways to engage with millions of customers on a one-to-one basis autonomously.

    8. Category-based demand

    In addition to a change in consumer spending, there is an ongoing shift in consumer tastes and preferences. The pandemic has brought about various buying habits and a recent survey by Nielsen identified a number of consumer behaviorisms but the following five trends are especially interesting:

    • Buying health and wellness products
    • Buying preventive health products such as masks and sanitizers
    • Stockpiling on pantry items
    • Buying in bulk
    • Fewer shopping trips
    Category-Based Demand: Buying Trends

    These five trends will translate to an increased demand for certain groups/categories of products including health products, grocery products with long shelf-life, and preventive safety gear. Additionally, it also means that eCommerce businesses should focus on aligning business goals with these new consumer behavior trends, for instance, by increasing average cart value, providing faster delivery, and better customer service.

    Our eCommerce trends predictions for 2021

    The COVID-19 pandemic has been ongoing for a year now but things are finally starting to change, albeit slowly. Various global health organizations have approved multiple vaccines and the initial rollout has already begun. This marks the first stage of pandemic recovery and also the first step into “the new normal”. That said, we are unlikely to see any overnight changes but rather shifts in consumer trends and preferences drawn out over the entire year. Our predictions for eCommerce trends in 2021 take this into consideration and revolve around the few dominant themes for this year, including remote working, customer service, autonomous working, and consumer behaviorisms.

    CONTACT US FOR A FREE CONSULTATION

    If you’d like to know more about how you can improve customer service on your eCommerce website or mobile application for the “new normal”, feel free to reach out to one of our conversational tech experts.

    Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !


    Top 8 eCommerce Trends in 2021 emerging amid the COVID-19 Pandemic was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

  • Automatically Reply to Instagram Comments

    I just published a video in which I explain how you can automatically reply to Instagram Comments by using ManyChat. I will show you how to:

    • Connect your Instagram account to ManyChat
    • Use the Instagram features if you don’t have enough followers (Instagram test account)
    • Automatically reply to Instagram Comments

    You can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdCOESQ0Utk

    Please let me know what you think in the comments 👇

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

  • a site dedicated to the programming of chatbots

    hello, I would like to give here a link to a site dedicated to the programming of chatbots in different programming languages (BASIC languages or C/C++ or python, etc.) the site even has a community forum and even an IRC channel – it seems that the site is currently into classical ELIZA’s chatbots style yet non the less I thought to bring a link to it here for whoever is interested.

    chatbots collection (google.com)

    submitted by /u/Specific-Bill
    [link] [comments]

  • Is Your Business Conversational AI-Ready? The Answer Lies In Your Data.

    Coding data being shown on a screen

    Has the news of Microsoft’s acquisition of Nuance brought the topic of conversational AI into your boardroom? Conversational assistants are definitely a hot topic at the moment. And with pressure to join the voice-first revolution mounting, businesses are suddenly becoming acutely aware of the potential deficiencies of their data.

    What types of data do we need to support artificial intelligence? Do we have enough data? Will our data need to be restructured? Where can we get more data? Boardrooms are currently swimming with data-related dilemmas. So, in this article, we talk about how this information is used to train conversational assistants, so you can assess whether you have the right foundations to support your AI ambitions and what you can do if you don’t.

    What is the role of data in Conversational AI?

    We expect a lot from Conversational AI nowadays. We trust the Just Eat AI assistant to deliver our takeaways to our exact specifications. Amazon’s AI agent can help us find our missing parcels without us having to engage with a human at all. And there are increasing opportunities to use AI to engage the visitors to your website by helping them find exactly the answer they need before they consider straying onto a competitor’s site.s

    But how do you train a computer to know what questions to ask to drill into our exact requirements? And where does its knowledge come from in the first place?

    As humans, we learn from our mistakes. To enable computers to behave in this way, they need to be spoon-fed this experience in the form of vast amounts of carefully labelled data. This enables your AI assistant to recognise patterns, dissect language, learn from previous behaviours and make autonomous decisions so they can respond in an appropriate and human-like fashion.

    Trending Bot Articles:

    1. How Conversational AI can Automate Customer Service

    2. Automated vs Live Chats: What will the Future of Customer Service Look Like?

    3. Chatbots As Medical Assistants In COVID-19 Pandemic

    4. Chatbot Vs. Intelligent Virtual Assistant — What’s the difference & Why Care?

    For example, to train Alana to ask the appropriate follow-up questions to decipher the intent behind a query, we take unstructured information from a range of internal and external sources. Then, with careful labelling we build a repository of machine-readable training data. This feeds the machine learning model that allows an Alana-powered assistant to adeptly steer any conversation in the right direction.

    Do we have enough data?

    Data efficiency and how we train language-generating AI machines to work from much smaller amounts of data is an important area of research Alana is leading. But right now, it’s undeniable that data is still in high demand when it comes to anything to do with artificial intelligence.

    For example, you may have heard it took 341 GB of data and 2.6 billion parameters to train Google’s voice assistant, Meena, to chat intelligently about virtually any topic. But did you know KLM used a more modest (by AI standards) 60,000 questions from its customers to train its BlueBot to book tickets and handle common customer FAQs?

    As you can see, the data demands of a project vary considerably — there simply isn’t a single useful ballpark to guide you on how much data you need to train a digital assistant. But, as a general guide, a simple chatbot solution that works on rigid rules and provides a short, scripted answer, is less data hungry. However, once you move into teaching a computer to ask follow-up questions and use more conversational language, the data demands increase.

    What data works well with conversational AI?

    Where does this data come from? The initial training dataset tells your AI assistant what people will be saying to it and allows it to work out how to respond.

    This data comes in many forms and often already exists within your organisation. You just might need some help knowing where to look. For example, with a narrow customer support remit, you may be able to create a script for a simple customer services AI assistant using data you already have in your CRM system. And if you want to adopt an interactive approach to answering customer FAQs, conversations extracted from emails and call centre transcripts can help train your AI assistant to handle common queries.

    So, the short answer is, you may already have a great foundation level of data, but the challenge is organising this information into a format that a machine can read and use.

    How to get your data AI ready

    Do you have too much data and find yourself grappling with the challenge (and cost) of how to organise it? Maybe you’re worried too little data will allow bias to creep into your assistant’s responses? And what exactly are the correct ethics when it comes to using the data you have gathered?

    In reality, the data we collect in our everyday operations is messy, incomplete and is unlikely to have the structure demanded by machine learning algorithms. But this doesn’t have to be a barrier to achieving your conversational AI ambitions.

    That’s where we can help you, so please get in touch.

    Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !


    Is Your Business Conversational AI-Ready? The Answer Lies In Your Data. was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.