Talk to me
Posted on January 6, 2008 by Martin Zagorsek
I had my most recent interactive eye-opener at an unlikely venue - a New Year’s Eve party at a ritzy house outside of Tel Aviv. In one of the chill-out rooms below the pounding dance floor, they had a PC set up with a chat window, and people were taking turns talking to “Alan“. Behind the PC was a glass door with a view of a room full of servers, presumably running Alan’s algorithms.
While Alan poses no immediate threat to the Turing test, I have to admit I was impressed. Chatbot technology has come a long way since Alice, though a lot of the same tricks are still in use - like changing the subject when you ask something it doesn’t know. Then again, it did remind me of the presidential primaries…
When chatbots finally get to the point where they can simulate human conversation there are many, many places where they’ll be useful. Most call center operators already rely on computer-supplied scripts to answer customer queries, it’s only a small step (conceptually at least) to replace the talking mouth with a chatbot. The bots might even do a better job than half the overseas call center operators I’ve come across.
While there will always be people who would rather pick up a phone and talk to a human, many of us who grew up with the Internet would actually rather not. If I’m surfing around a company’s site trying to figure out a problem, and their support pages (as usual) aren’t helpful, I’d much rather pop a chat window than have to pick up a phone and sit on hold for 10 minutes.
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