The hype over A.I. and bots shows no signs of simmering with the accelerating investments, a developer ‘gold rush’ and ease in building bots. According to Pandorabots, there are more than 225,000 bot developers and upwards of 300,000 bots in existence today.
However, a rush like this to create bots is usually backed up by a consumer demand. In this case, there’s little to no demand for customers asking brands to adopt bots. In fact, based on BJ Fogg’s behavior model, for consumer behavior to shift, the bot needs to be easier to use than the activity it’s replacing. Bots are clunky. They’re not, at this point, easier than calling, emailing, or texting a company.
Despite the wide disparity in the quality of bots out there, some are actually helpful because they make a single activity easier. A few are utilizing real AI and can use context for more realistic conversations. However, for now the user experience of most bots are rudimentary at best.
With so many bots, how will you know which ones are actually helpful? As I’ve alluded to in my earlier post, some of these early chatbots may help companies cut costs, but there is still tremendous work to be done to truly create a better customer experience.
From VentureBeat analysis, there are just a handful of bots that are delivering true value and usefulness and offers a taste of what a real intelligent bot experience could be like. The common theme is that a bot built to deliver a clearly defined and specific task is one that’s most realistic today e.g., where a user only asks a set of pre-determined questions. So here’s my take on the most useful bots to check out right now:
1. X.ai
Amy is x.ai’s personal assistant that can schedule meetings to give you time to do more important things. X.ai’s success is that Amy’s ambition is limited to just doing one thing well. She effortlessly schedules meetings but doesn’t solve any other problems nor does she attend the meeting or take notes. I was part of apanel on talking to machines with x.ai’s founder, Dennis Mortensen. He has placed all bets that bots are great for incredibly small tasks and need to be 99% perfect. His bot Amy, who schedules meetings, is the full embodiment of that. Anyone who’s used Amy to book a meeting knows that scheduling is easy and conversational.
2. Birdly
Birdly is a bot that manages your expenses directly on Slack. For a startup like ours, this offers tremendous efficiency. We can cut down on time spent on expense reports by being able to use the data from receipts or invoices and have them be “automagically” recognized.
3. Howdy
Howdy is a bot that helps you run meetings. For example, you can give Howdy a set of questions to ask your team, such as “who is working on what?” or “when will it be completed?” In a nutshell, Howdy assists in team management by collating meeting responses together and delivers them to you in Slack. This is a big help for us because instead of copy/pasting the same question a ton of times, we can just use Howdy to ask, compile, and share these questions.
4. Asist
Asist is a chatbot that aggregates with on-demand services like GrubHub, Uber, Lyft, and Open Table, and users can text, Facebook message, or communicate through Assist to book hotels, order delivery, or get a ride. Asist learns as it goes, too, using the input from users as the machine learning base to improve.
5. Pana
Pana is a virtual travel agent that blends real humans with A.I. Using Pana, you get access to a human travel team and a messaging A.I. Pana also becomes your concierge and can make vetted recommendations for where to eat and places to go. Any avid traveler can save tons of time with Pana, since booking travel is mostly searching the same thing across a ton of sites.
6. HealthTap bot
HealthTap’s mission is to make healthcare more accessible by letting users ask questions, get test results assessed and referrals from real doctors. It recently launched its chatbot on Messenger. The bot can analyze your requests and shows you similar questions asked by other users. This bot is helpful, but may be considered scary for users who don’t want to share information with a robot that actively collects, analyzes, and shares back the data to others. With health information being so personal, HealthTap can be great for those with no inhibitions, or a complete nightmare for those who prefer to keep their health information personal.
7. Ozlo
Ozlo is a personal A.I. that makes finding information from your phone faster and easier. You interact with Ozlo by engaging in a two-way text conversation and it provides answers in neatly presented cards with deep links to the apps and websites that provided the information.
8. Sephora bot on Kik
Consumers can converse with Sephora to find, buy products and get beauty tips via the Kik chat platform. The Sephora bot acts like the in-store sales assistant and delivers on three key attributes of customer service – be always available, instant, and highly knowledgeable. It’s like a Sephora team member in bot form.
Source:digitalreview
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