Tetyana Karpenko interviews Svistlana Höhn, who has a PHD degree in computer science and works on creating chatbots.
Background:
What a fun these chatbots are! The one created for an American comedy show can chat exactly like George Washington would do. Sometimes it does not follow you, but it is not a problem, as it is meant just for entertainment.
At the same time, quite a plenty of chatbots, which are used in Kik, WeChat, Telegram, and now, Facebook Messenger are meant to be serious and helpful.
Facebook went even one step further and invited companies to make their own chatbots to chat with customers via Facebook Messenger.
Mark Zuckerberg: "You probably interact with dozens of businesses every day and most of them probably really meaningful to you. But I never met anyone who likes calling a business…. We think that you just have to have a messenger business the same way as you have a messenger friend."
At the same time, David Marcus vice president of product development stressed that Facebook bots combine new user experience with chatting. And it looks that Facebook innovation was not as much about bots, but much more about bringing businesses to the place where a lot of people spend their time - to the Messenger.
Mark Zuckerberg and David Marcus claim that build a Facebook chatbot is simple.
David Marcus vice president of Messaging Products at “Facebook”: "Let me show how it works, you feed the bot engine with simple conversations. And then, It can handle all the variations of this conversation on its own. Using AI and machine learning it just gets better and better over time. You do not need to code everything; it will do the job for you."
Well, this simple solution does not satisfy users. First feedbacks were not positive. Users write that Messenger bots are put on its limits by really easy questions. For example, a weather chatbot stuck with a simple question like “Will it rain tomorrow?”
Tetyana Karpenko and Sviatlana Höhn
Audio recording of the Part III of the Interview (unabridged version).
Sviatlana answers the following questions:
Tetyana Karpenko and Sviatlana Höhn
Audio recording of the Part III of the Interview (unabridged version).
Sviatlana answers the following questions:
- Svitlana, we have seen here David Marcus saying we need to feed the chatboot with simple conversations. I here users are expected to have simple conversations. But we also know from research and also from experience that people may like to have complicated conversations or there are people which would like just to have fun or to trick the bot. Will this end up like the story of the Tay bot of the Microsoft, we have been talking about in the second part of our program?
- Well, Facebook claims, that bots will tremendously change the way we interact with devices. A small prediction - how far this will go.