CategoryChatbots

November 24, 2016 — Is chatting actually good for bots? Early user reviews of chatbots suggest not. How “chatty” your chatbot should be will depend on your users’ mental models of chatbots and the goals and needs your chatbot fulfills for them. Problems occur when designers do not decide up front who their audience is, how the chatbot fits into their business or brand strategy, what domains the chatbot will and will not cover, and what a successful experience should look like. Gizmodo writer Darren Orf describes Facebook’s chatbot user experiences as “frustrating and useless” and compares using them to “trying to talk politics with a toddler.” His criticisms are not unfair. Read more…

October 17, 2016 — One of the most famous chat bots was Alice (artificial linguistic Internet computer entity), released in 1995. It wasn’t able to pass the Turing test, but it won the Loebner Prize three times. In 2014, Slackbot made chat bots popular again. In 2015, Telegram and then Facebook Messenger released chat bot support; then, in 2016 Skype did the same, and Apple and some other companies announced even more chat bot platforms. Depending on your idea, target market and the platforms you are most familiar with, you can start with any of the other platforms that support chat bots. Read more…

July 18, 2016 — With technology evolving and language recognition and processing improving, we are on a path that could make interaction with digital services more intuitive, more accessible and more efficient — through conversational interfaces. Conversational interfaces are still in their infancy. There are still hurdles to jump, and we need to explore what works and what doesn’t. However, this means that there are no beaten paths, yet. It’s a time for experimentation, a time to tinker with the concept and try out something new. Read more…