Bootstrapping Chatbots

It is ok to bootstrap your chatbot using keywords / hand-coded rules, but you should think of ways to gather data from users interaction and leverage it using machine learning.  

 

Introducing WeChat

I found this article about the experience learnt while creating the WeChat chatbots, in China, of all places.

WeChat started creating simple chatbots in 2009. WeChat proves that, as a matter of fact, chatbots can be successful. China lives in another internet ecosystem and may show us an alternative timeline, compared to the one we are living in the west. In our "Western" timeline, chatbots are nowhere as successful as they are in China.

Too bad I don't speak Chinese and cannot actually try these chatbots.

How is WeChat doing ?

WeChat has made it easy to create very simple chatbots that are actually not very intelligent. It has become one of the favored ways for customer service to reduce the work they do interacting with customers online.

 Chumen Wenwen ... has built a very sophisticated bot that ... combines voice recognition, AI and the WeChat platform into a package that queries information for its users. By connecting with third party API’s the app can answer questions about what is around you, including movies, restaurants, massage and more.

We are astonished to learn that many entrepreneurs doing business in China create an official WeChat account before they even launch their website.

Customer service accounts

The kind of bots we are interested in are customer service accounts. 

They turned out to be necessary in China because customers

bombard the brand themselves with questions, before they make a purchase online or in-store. The sheer number of consumers and their zest for questioning is what created the need for chatbots in China before they ever came into the minds of Facebook and others.

 

Nevertheless, it is important to point out that bots are incapable of handling all types of customer requests. As a result these accounts need to be supported by employees.
 

Technology

Let's get to the part that interests us most - technology. 

WeChat bots work by identifying keywords in text strings and using hand-coded rules for how to respond to different situations. Yet, they still use machine learning and the more users interact with companies and brands via chatbots, the smarter they will become, and the faster they will learn to understand user inputs.

Lesson To Learn: it is ok to bootstrap your chatbot using keywords / hand-coded rules, but you should think of ways to gather data from users interaction  that you can leverage using machine learning.

What do these bots have to do anyway ? They have mainly to answer users' queries, not to take actions on them. So my guess would be that they are focused on intents rather than on entities.

Although bots are gradually learning to understand customer requests, they still text back only pre-set responses.

So after they have recognized users' intents, they text back precanned-responses. Got it.