Category: Chat

The year 2020 has been a rough one, but this hasn’t stopped new ideas from emerging and making their way. Especially when talking about new social networks and connectivity tools. The same applies to the new social media developed by Silicon Valley entrepreneur P. Davison and ex-Google employee R. Seth.

This brand new social media platform, Clubhouse, wants to change the way people talk. Rather than share text, users can openly communicate by sharing voice recordings. Company founders believe that Clubhouse will allow people everywhere to be more open. They will be able to tell stories, develop ideas, and meet new friends.

New types of social platforms seem to appear every day. This one is different, though. Instead of text posts, users share audio clips.

What exactly is the Clubhouse?

In this social network, real-time audio brings you a completely new way to interact with other members of the Clubhouse. The audio is your only means of communication.

Besides this, it is like any other social platform. It’s where you can connect with new friends, enrich your network, tell stories — and even perform.

But most of all, discuss in-depth the issues that interest you most and ask questions. You can also learn and listen to conversations on thousands of different topics, and from all over the world!

For what’s inside Clubhouse, a description of their own words can be more accurate:

What is Clubhouse?
Clubhouse is a new type of network based on voice. When you open the app you can see “rooms” full of people talking. All open so you can hop in and out, exploring different conversations. You enter each room as an audience member, but if you want to talk you just raise your hand, and the speakers can choose to invite you up. Or you can create a room of your own. -A description from Paul and Rohan on their blog post.

Trending Bot Articles:

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

Clubhouse meaning and history

The Clubhouse platform launched in March 2020. It came after a series of experimentation and attempts on other social products. Products that mostly failed or were shut down, from both founders.

As for the Clubhouse meaning, their intention, as they would write in their blog, is the following:

Our goal was to build a social experience that felt more human-where instead of posting, you could gather with other people and talk… something where you could close the app at the end of the session feeling better than you did when you opened it. Paul, Rohan and the Clubhouse team — January 24 2021 Article

We can say that they have reached pretty much the initial goal they had, and intend to spread it to the entire world.

Month after month, after the launch, the number of users keeps increasing. Even if the platform works with an invite-only system.

But this didn’t stop thousands of people from trying to join the platform. A desire fed mostly by the fact that many public figures had joined.

VIP members like celebrities, Hollywood actors, famous musicians, and Entrepreneurs. Also, Investors, Venture capitalists, and Real Estate agents have joined the platform. During the last months, it was also joined by athletes, comedians, authors, and scientists.

How to get a Clubhouse invite?

For those who want a Clubhouse invite, you need to have the right connections. If you don’t have contact with someone already inside the platform, it might be hard.

However, something you can try is to find people around offering them. Doing a search on different social media can be fruitful. There are a lot of posts offering clubhouse invites for free or in exchange for a follow, even if it’s not right.

An easy way, for example, is to find the tweet Elon Musk made about him participating in an open conversation inside a Clubhouse room.
This caused a boom of retweets from a lot of people offering invites.

From 0 to 6 Million

According to the latest data, the app crossed 6 million registered users on February 1.

According to this study, most of the members have joined the platform during the last 3 months. This is why the growth trajectory forms a 90𝇈 angle.

After the app issued 20 invites to each Testflighter the number of the members started rising exponentially.

It was mid-January when the platform reached its first million and kept on rising. There were several factors that contributed to this immense global request to join the app.

There was another factor in addition to high profile figures from the business community. The fact that many people started investing in it. Investing to be part of the company but also as influencers. By using their own social media, skyrocketed the fame of this new social media platform.

There are two events worth mentioning to have helped this radical growth:

– The Clubhouse Lion King Production

All eyes were on Clubhouse on Dec. 26 for the premiere of “The Lion King” musical, as it came to Clubhouse in a real-time performance. For all those who joined, Clubhouse gave the users a complete musical experience.

Complete with a 40-member cast, along with a choir and live instrumentation. This all concluded with a tweet made by the director of the performance, which had been commented on for a few days in a row.

But this would not be the only performance executed through this platform. There were a lot of other “rooms” doing similar activities.

– A single tweet from Elon Musk

Elon Musk is known, time after time, to support new startups, and his words make a great impact.

The same thing happened with the Clubhouse app.
On January 31 he made a single tweet about him participating in a Clubhouse event called Good Time.

This caused a storm of retweets and new tweets. Many of them confirming their presence and most of all offering free invites to join the app.

As of February 1, the app registered more than 6 Million registered users, and the number kept increasing. The number of people registering was so big it caused the app to crash on the morning of February 2.

High investment does not mean no issues

Since March 2020, this new social media platform has attracted the attention of many investors. High capital investors and venture capitalists.

Different sources confirm that Clubhouse, on its first round of funding, raised capital from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). $10 million in primary funds and at least $2 million in secondary shares.

The deal was said to value the company at or just above $100 million.

Second round

After 8 months from its first round of investments, the social network Clubhouse said that it raised a new round of funding. Again from the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).

Money it plans to use to improve the platform. For example, introduce paid features, and set up a grant program where popular users will get paid.

Yet, none of them has made an official statement on the latest developments. Only the fact that they now have over 180 investors from different backgrounds.

It is believed that the Clubhouse has a $1 billion valuation in less than a year. This value came after receiving more than $100 million of investments.

But there are still issues to solve

The great number of investments surely will help improve the platform and offer a better experience for its users.

However, Clubhouse has more urgent issues to solve. Issues that even huge social platforms like Facebook or Twitter have difficulties with.

Something that they would address directly in one of their communications:

“This past week, people on Clubhouse have hosted several intense conversations on topics of identity, ethnicity, gender, racism, and religion. These conversations led to a number of serious incident reports, and we received questions and concerns from our community about how we plan to scale safety and moderation on Clubhouse.”

The Clubhouse has received a lot of criticism. Aimed for its lack of adequate harassment protocols and inability to handle complaints.

This along with people saying that the moderation process should be more stringent.

Even if this communication was made nearly 4 months ago.

Their plans for the future

As for the incident reports, Clubhouse has made a clear response against these acts. This is what they announced through a previous official communication:

– First, we unequivocally condemn Anti-Blackness, Anti-Semitism, and all other forms of racism, hate speech and abuse on Clubhouse.
– People who violate them are warned, suspended, or removed completely from the platform, depending on the severity of the offense.

Along with these acts of improvement, they have announced their intentions to improve other things.

Their intention is not to only improve the in-app experience. They also intend to expand the reach of their platform. This helped from the last round of investments.

– Increased accessibility

One of their objectives is to make the platform available for Android users. This considering the fact that the app momentarily is available only for IOS users.

On the other side, they intend to add more localized features so every user can have a more native experience.

– Performance & Personalization

Their investment in advanced technologies will bring a more performant in-app experience. They will also improve the personalization of how the users can discover people, rooms, and clubs by making it adaptive to their interests.

– Creator Grant Program

The Clubhouse creators are the backbone of the platform. They will be supported in the future through a payment system. This will be a way for them to be recognized for their effort. It will be made possible through features like tipping, tickets, or subscriptions.

This will certainly motivate the existing ones to become more active and aim for quality and invite new ones over.

– Customer Support

As the platform grows, Clubhouse intends to raise its efforts towards user safety. This means increasing the Support and Trust & Safety teams along with improving the tools for abuse prevention.

As for the invite-only joining mode of the platform, there is nothing to do but wait. Wait till Clubhouse becomes available for everyone. The Clubhouse has already claimed to make the platform available for Android users soon.

Considering this, there are high chances for the app to become available for everyone within this year.

Clubhouse app as a voice first social platform

The thing that makes Clubhouse special is the fact that the only way you have to communicate with other people is by using your voice. And this is how it will always be.

No text, no photos, no videos. Voice recordings only.

Of course, using voice is available in other platforms too, but for Clubhouse, voice is their DNA.

Some people even consider it as a live, podcast exchanging platform.

Voice technologies and their potential in social networking

Reconsidering everything that happened during 2020, we can say that voice has taken large importance. From smart speakers and voice assistants to voice-assisted services and high investment in voice first platforms.

The voice, not only for being a simple communicating tool but also a way to transmit emotion and character with each voice recording.

The voice trend & the future

The trend of voice will continue to disrupt and revolutionize not only the social networking industry. It has already changed many operations in business internal and external processes, customer service, and education.

This is the main reason why many investors in voice technologies have joined the platform lately.

Not only to explore this new platform. It is also a way for them to discuss and share ideas.

It all started as a way to facilitate everyday actions. Now every company has started to understand the importance of voice.

We are using them every day and more through voice assistants and smart speakers. Along with text-to-speech services, chatbots, online chats, and social media.

Clubhouse potential to change the use of voice in Social Media

Silicon Valley is one of the world’s most entrepreneurial hubs. This is where products are constantly changing and innovating. For them, Social media apps have served as both failure examples and the source of value creation.

The Clubhouse platform surprised everyone with its explosive growth and collection of investors. But this happened for a specific reason.

As Jeremiah Owyang describes it on his article:

“Text is not enough, and video is too much; social audio is just right. It represents the opportunity for social connection and empathy without the downsides of video.”

During the last years, many companies have tried launching a voice-only app or web platform. Yet, none of them has dealt with it as Clubhouse has done.

Starting as a private project, it found what people were looking for. A way of communicating without the uncomfortable part of showing on video or the hassle of writing everything.

A leap to new business opportunities

The success of Clubhouse as a voice first social media has created space for new uses of social audio. It does not hold only the significance of making voice more important.

It has planted the seed and given the chance to grow to a whole new level of product categories and business models.

In the future, we will start to see more and more companies offering social audio analytics, software, services, and management systems.

If more voice-oriented social platforms start to grow, it will create new ways to monetize services like premium options. Unique audio/text ads & ad-free experience, voice brands, promotion & sponsoring, and voice data analytics.

Also, the chance for the talented ones to become voice influencers.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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Clubhouse Invite and More: A Non-Definitive Guide was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I remember before the pandemic, my friends and I would sometimes jokingly and other times not so jokingly, swap phones and Swipe for one another on dating apps. We mostly used Bumble and hinge.
I thought it would be interesting to make this possible even when there’s a pandemic happening. In other words: have a feature that allows friends to swipe for one another and matchmake. I decided to test how this feature would present itself in Bumble as it is one of the most popular dating apps on the market.

Disclaimer

This feature was designed independently from bumble and purely for the purpose of exploration. I do not own any rights to the existing mobile application. I utilized screenshots from the internet and my own phone and put together these wireframes on using Figma. The entire process took about 2 working days to complete (brainstorming, user flows and wireframing). This was developed and conceptualized during the covid 19 pandemic.

So What’s the issue and Who is this designed for?

Including friends’ feedback when swiping on dating apps is difficult when it’s not possible to gather. Sharing potential matches via screenshots can take too long at times. Having friends be able to swipe for you makes the process much more interactive, fun and less time consuming.

I designed Bumble wings to cater to those who have some trouble and difficulties putting themselves out there and utilizing the dating apps.
Someone like Carrie.

User Flow and Wireframing

I used the user flows as a guideline rather than a strict succession of tasks, seeing as I was going to manipulate and make these flows fit within an existing application. I did not want to overcomplicate them at this stage because I wanted to have room for flexibility and adaptation to the existing user flows of the mobile app

The initial Sketches helped me better visualize what kind of features and buttons I need for every page before diving into the final graphics of it. I had a pretty clear idea of what the screen would look seeing as I was building off an existing product and only sketched out some essential parts of the wireframes before building them from the existing bumble interface and wireframes.

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.

Final Screens

Wings can swipe to match or classify some profiles as Maybees to allow the user to decide whether or not they want they want to swipe right on them.
Wing privileges can be revoked at any time.
The + button (in yellow) allows the user to add as many Wings as they like.

If a match is done by a Wing, then a small Icon of the Wing who matched the user will appear near the photo of the match. The user can also access the Maybee list- also chosen by Wings.

Maybees are profiles the Wings recommend to the user but leave it up the user to decide if they want to match with them or not. A photo of the Wing is shown near the profile of the Maybee for reference.

Maybees can be viewed in swipe view or in queue view (similar to the existing beeline feature in bumble).

If a Wing sees a profile that might be a match for a friend, they can click on the bee icon to match or Maybee the profile for someone they are winging for.
A search field comes up where the Wing can look up anyone they are winging for and match the profile for them.
Alternatively, they can swipe for a friend directly from BumbleWings as opposed to finding matches from their personal queues. The photo of the person they are winging for is in the upper left hand corner.
Swipe left for no, Right for yes and swipe upwards to Maybee

You can see the full case study with the low fidelity wireframes and ideas for future iterations on my website by clicking here

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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Bumble Wings- A UX Proposal was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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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 👏 !

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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 👏 !

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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.

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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.

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