If you’ve ever used a customer support live-chat service, you’ve probably experienced that vague, sneaking suspicion that the “person” you’re chatting with might actually be a robot.
Like the endearingly stiff robots we’ve seen in countless movies – tragic, pitiful machines tortured by their painfully restricted emotional range, futilely hoping to attain a greater degree of humanity – chatbots often sound almost human, but not quite. Their speech is awkward, the cadence somehow off.
It’s the online equivalent of the “Uncanny Valley,” a mysterious region nestled somewhere between the natural and the synthetic that offers a disturbing glimpse at how humans are making machines that could eventually supplant humans, if only their designers could somehow make their robotic creations less nightmarish.
Love them or hate them, chatbots are here to stay. Chatbots have become extraordinarily popular in recent years largely due to dramatic advancements in machine learning and other underlying technologies such as natural language processing. Today’s chatbots are smarter, more responsive, and more useful – and we’re likely to see even more of them in the coming years.
In this post, we’ll be taking a look at 10 of the most innovative ways companies are using them. We’ll be exploring why chatbots have become such a popular marketing technology, as well as the wider, often-unspoken impacts these constructs promise to have on how we communicate, do business, and interact with one another online.
Before we get into the examples, though, let’s take a quick look at what chatbots really are and how they actually work.
What Are Chatbots?
Chatbots – also known as “conversational agents” – are software applications that mimic written or spoken human speech for the purposes of simulating a conversation or interaction with a real person. There are two primary ways chatbots are offered to visitors: via web-based applications or standalone apps. Today, chatbots are used most commonly in the customer service space, assuming roles traditionally performed by living, breathing human beings such as Tier-1 support operatives and customer satisfaction reps.
Conversational agents are becoming much more common partly due to the fact that barriers to entry in creating chatbots (i.e. sophisticated programming knowledge and other highly specialized technical skills) are becoming increasingly unnecessary.
Today, you can make your very own chatbot that you can use in Facebook Messenger, for example – all without a pricey Computer Science degree or even much prior coding experience– and there are several sites that offer the ability to create rudimentary chatbots using simple drag-and-drop interfaces.
Here are few companies using chatbots for marketing, to provide better customer service, to seal deals and more.
Endurance: A Companion for Dementia Patients
My mother was diagnosed with aggressive Alzheimer’s disease two years ago, and having observed her sudden decline firsthand, I can tell you how difficult it is to watch someone with dementia struggle with even the most basic of conversational interactions.
Unfortunately, my mom can’t really engage in meaningful conversations anymore, but many people suffering with dementia retain much of their conversational abilities as their illness progresses. However, the shame and frustration that many dementia sufferers experience often make routine, everyday talks with even close family members challenging. That’s why Russian technology company Endurance developed its companion chatbot.
Many people with Alzheimer’s disease struggle with short-term memory loss. As such, the chatbot aims to identify deviations in conversational branches that may indicate a problem with immediate recollection – quite an ambitious technical challenge for an NLP-based system.
In addition, since the chatbot is a cloud-based solution, physicians and family members can review communication logs taken from the bot to identify potential degradation of memory function and communicative obstacles that could signify deterioration of the patient’s condition.
Interestingly, the as-yet unnamed conversational agent is currently an open-source project, meaning that anyone can contribute to the development of the bot’s codebase. The project is still in its earlier stages, but has great potential to help scientists, researchers, and care teams better understand how Alzheimer’s disease affects the brain. A Russian version of the bot is already available, and an English version is expected at some point this year.
Casper: Helping Insomniacs Get Through the Night
If you suffer from insomnia, as I do, you’ll know that the feeling of almost suffocating loneliness – the idea that everyone else in the world is resting peacefully while your own mind betrays you with worries and doubts – is among the worst parts of not being able to sleep.
Enter Casper’s amazingly named Insomnobot 3000 (which truly is one of the most tongue-in-cheek, retro-futuristic names for a chatbot I’ve ever come across), a conversational agent that aims to give insomniacs someone to talk to while the rest of the world rests easy.
At this point, Insomnobot 3000 is a little rudimentary. As you can see in the screenshot above, the responses offered by the agent aren’t quite right – next stop, Uncanny Valley – but the bot does highlight how conversational agents can be used imaginatively.
I’m not sure whether chatting with a bot would help me sleep, but at least it’d stop me from scrolling through the never-ending horrors of my Twitter timeline at 4 a.m.
4. Marvel: Guarding the Galaxy with Comic-Book Crossovers
At this point, Marvel’s cinematic universe seems to be expanding even faster than the boundaries of the observable universe itself, so I guess it was only a matter of time before Marvel turned to chatbots to further immerse fans in their favorite comic-book storylines in real life.
Although director James Gunn’s 2016 Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 was pretty bad (even casting Kurt Russell couldn’t save it), Chris Pratt’s portrayal of space-pirate-turned-intergalactic-hero Star-Lord was spot on – and Marvel’s chatbot that lets comic-book geeks talk to Star-Lord himself is also pretty decent.
The bot (which also offers users the opportunity to chat with your friendly neighborhood Spiderman) isn’t a true conversational agent, in the sense that the bot’s responses are currently a little limited; this isn’t a truly “freestyle” chatbot. For example, in the conversation above, the bot didn’t recognize the reply as a valid response – kind of a bummer if you’re hoping for an immersive experience.
There are several defined conversational branches that the bots can take depending on what the user enters, but the primary goal of the app is to sell comic books and movie tickets. As a result, the conversations users can have with Star-Lord might feel a little forced. One aspect of the experience the app gets right, however, is the fact that the conversations users can have with the bot are interspersed with gorgeous, full-color artwork from Marvel’s comics.
Overall, not a bad bot, and definitely an application that could offer users much richer experiences in the near future.
Build Your Own Chatbot
While all these chatbots seem advanced, they’re relatively simple to build using our chatbot development services and experts analysis for your business.
Have you encountered a particularly memorable chatbot? Are you developing your own chatbot for your business’s Facebook page? Get at me with your views, experiences, and thoughts on the future of chatbots in the comments.
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