Showing posts with label chatbots. Show all posts
Showing posts with label chatbots. Show all posts

Sunday, 29 January 2017

How Robots will take over Jobs in coming Years?

We have already started talking about robots and have been floated many pilot projects where robots are acting as assistants to help customers in trivial matters. Industry experts have already mulled loss of jobs in BPO sector because of introduction to chatbots. We have just scratched the tip of AI and as we make strides in technology and make advancements, it is likely the far-fetched prophecy comes true. This is how Robots are likely to affect our society in next 10-15 years.
Today, Robots are doing human work in a wide range of places. Best of all, they are doing the jobs that are unhealthy or impractical for people. This frees up workers to do the more skilled jobs, including programming, maintenance and operation of robots. Robots that work on cars and trucks are welding and assembling parts or lifting overwhelming parts – the type of jobs that include risks like injury or they work in situations loaded with hazards like excessive heat, noise or fumes-perilous places for people.

Rather than mindlessly doing chores for you, robots will perceive outward appearances, non-verbal communication and verbal cues to give a more human-like interaction. These robots will read these clues and hold individual, life-like conversations.

High quality products can prompt to higher sales, which implies the organization that uses technology like robots will probably remain alive and virtual, which is good for the economy. Notwithstanding enhancing quality, robots enhance profitability, another key element to economic wellbeing. The AI today is in no way like the gloomy, glowing cyborg we once imagined – it’s more unusual, all more fascinating and more astounding. It’s superior to anything we imagined. 

Wednesday, 26 October 2016

Know about Chatbots

Messaging platforms are coming of age, and chatbots are all the rage now, they are touted as the next app like wave in communication industry. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are advancing by the day, there is a layer of it being added to everything we know, smart cars, smart homes, smart shoes and of course messengers have become platforms on which commerce and brand communications are being built now.

There are three key drivers shaping the market for chatbots. Firstly, large communication technology companies from the likes of Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Google are making it conducive for building chat based products, they have opened up their respective messaging platforms for developers to build and innovate on top of it. Even Apple has announced APIs for Siri, a move to allow developers into what has been a walled garden so far. So to say, chatbots are no longer standalone products but part of an ecosystem just like how apps are built and distributed on app stores.
Secondly, there's a rising usage of Messengers over traditional SMSes; recently, Zuckerberg announced that 60 billion messages are sent over Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp every day, together they are thrice bigger than the 20 billion SMS sent. WeChat in China has set an impeccable precedence to show the world how a thriving metamarket can be built within a chat app. WeChat is more like a virtual hypermarket on top of which others businesses have built stores through chat apps.  

Third macro factor driving the rise of chatbots is the Gen next's growing preference to chat based interfaces. Messaging has surpassed social media to become the preferred method of communication for millennial. Mary Meeker's research shows that 69 percent of millennial prefer web/internet chat, social media, and messaging to other channels such as talking on phone or IVRS. In past decade we saw brands enabling customers to do everything online, from ordering pizzas with emojis to banking with hash tags, we have seen it all. Chatbots is the emerging new world order.

All of this gives genuine reasons for marketers to consider investing their time and efforts to build chatbots and make it an effective means to allure new wave of customers their way. Chat apps/ bots is not a magic wand one can wave to make a product or service awesome. In foreseeable future, chatbots are only likely to be another customer touch point or an interface to existing business, it can perhaps slowly replace the load on IVRS and Email based customer support.
Chatbots are slowly evolving into an enabler, a digital concierge. But that evolution comes with a subset of challenges, one of them is the multi-agent problem. Consider this, Google's upcoming messenger Allo allows user to add @Google in a group chat and invoke it for getting answers or to get things done. Besides the multi-agent problem, there's another task for marketers to grapple with, to ensure a seamless experience for people using chatbots and smart assistants. 

Communication is a tough business:the way a message is written is not how people preceive it. Just like humans have selective distortion problems, bots have context and natural language processing (NLP) problems. For now, the only jobs chatbots can take away are that of a few helpless souls working at call centres with pseudo American names and a fake accent.