Let’s Talk Chatbots

Whether you’re looking for a movie on Netflix, playing Pokémon Go, ordering flowers, checking in for a flight, or getting divorced in Europe — there’s a bot for that. There are even bots for Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton.

In Silicon Valley bots have become a favourite topic and all over the world, companies are jumping head-first on to the botwagon.

There’s enough head-spinning hype to make one downright skeptical. And it doesn’t help that not enough people have even experienced a bot yet.

While some snidely say business are getting their bots together just to be in the news and not be left behind, it’s obvious to many that conversational commerce, which once started out with real humans, will be the way forward as artificial intelligence and natural language processing advance and combine and come out of their research labs. What more endorsement does one need than from Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Satya Nadella who say bots are the next apps.

India is as much bot country as anywhere else. Ratan Tata, chairman emeritus of Tata Sons Ltd. certainly believes in them. In May this year, he invested an undisclosed sum in Niki.ai, an artificial intelligence startup, set up by four IIT Kharagpur Alumni founders to ‘revolutionise conversational commerce’. Sachin Jaiswal, one of the founders, is quick to point out that Niki.ai was started in 2015, ahead of the bot craze. Niki.ai is an app that uses natural language processing and machine learning technologies in a platform that has a chat interface for connecting customers with businesses. “We thought that things like recharging a mobile phone, takes so many taps and clicks...” says Jaiswal. “With a bot all you need to do is just tell it what you want.” With Niki.ai, one can book a cab, order food, pay mobile bills, and even get your laundry picked up.

But even so, do we really need bots?

In Search Of A Need
One could argue —and one does — that bots are a solution in search of a problem. But in truth, different businesses have found their own uses for bots. Aarti Gill, founder of FitCircle, a startup that encourages customers to stick to a healthy lifestyle and deals in health supplements as well, decided to spend a lot of time and effort to create a bot to keep users engaged and not drop off their usage of the fitness app, as is typical. “We found that we get a lot of questions from users on very basic health issues and they want experts to answer these,” said Gill. “For example, will protein bulk up my body and make me look like a body-builder? We categorised the questions we get and built a bot to answer the basic ones,” she said. It was while using the bot that it was realised that for bots to be smart, they not only needed information from experts but needed to keep learning as usage increased. Gill used her observations of the use of WeChat in China to plan how a bot would help her company, FitCircle. In this case, the bot reduced the amount of time paid experts would have to spend personally answering questions that were basic enough, escalating only those that needed more complex inputs.

Saving Time
Computers may have beaten human beings at chess and Go, but bots are not quite there with either the natural language or the intelligence they need. Yogesh Agarwal, founder of CareOnGo, a medicine ordering and record keeping startup, is keen on using technology throughout the working of the service for customers and pharmacies. To make ordering medicines easier for customers, a Chat to Order bot is tucked away in a corner of the company’s website. “Right from searching for the name of a medicine to placing an order, the whole process can be handled from here,” says Agarwal. The chatbot does indeed handle the process and is chatty, but not without frustrations for the customer. Expecting it to handle misspellings for a drug will result in disappointment as will any natural language questions, despite the chatty phrases you sometimes get.

Vala Afshar, writer and evangelist for Salesforce, warns of the need to avoid trying to forget all about the value of human interaction while using bots. “In many ways it makes sense for retailers to incorporate bots in areas that can be controlled, like automating everyday customer service tasks (imagine never sitting on hold again), says Afshar, in a post for the Financial Post. “Companies including Salesforce are working on a variety of predictive journeys including suggested answers, to help community managers and call centre agents use artificial intelligence to help solve customer issues much faster,” he writes.

Another company that uses bots to save time and resources is Prepathon, a test preparation app and service by PaGaLGuY. Their claim is that they bring the first ever bot in the education world — and yes, the company uses the existence of its bots to further its brand. Prepathon’s bot will give its customers (students) a progress report like a teacher would, make study plans like a tutor, provides you revision practice like a coach and motivate like a mentor. Founder Allwin Agnel says “We first thought of bots last year when we saw the amount of repetitive work our coaches had to do. We felt we could automate the responses in order to reduce some of this work load. This included answering some very basic questions and also messaging the users asking them to study the topic of the day, to motivate them and so on.”

Personal Assistants
Bots are being used by companies for branding, saving time and resources, handling queries, customer service, and for analytics and better targeting. But one of the main uses is as personal assistants. And currently, living in messengers such as Facebook’s, businesses are using their bots with solving a little problem or addressing a need. Meru Cabs, for instance, lets you book a cab via a chat. Ixigo just launched Ixibaba, an AI powered travel assistant to give “quick quirky answers” to all travel planning and booking related queries. Healthcare company Lybrate is also on Facebook Messenger to answer health-related questions addressed by its network of over 100,000 doctors. It’s much the same with dozens of other companies, joining the platform on a daily basis.

Despite this unbridled explosion of bots, the majority of India’s connected users haven’t yet discovered or begun using them in earnest. For now, it’s users who have to go to the bot rather than the bot coming to the user in the context and situation needed. The challenge of having bots fit seamlessly into human interaction still needs to be addressed so that people can take over where bots leave off. And of course, bots have to offer much more than apps do in order to be compelling. It isn’t enough for bots to just be there but to take the conversation further.

mala@businessworld.in

@malabhargava