Meet the 6 People Who Will Change Your Mind About Chatbots
Originally published by Loic Le Meur on LinkedIn: Meet the 6 People Who Will Change Your Mind About Chatbots
With the flood of chatbots in your Facebook feed, and AI quickly transcending TV and film to be a much greater reality in our everyday lives, the question “what are chatbots… and why should I care about them?” has probably crossed your mind at some point in the last few years. Last night, over 300 thought leaders and bot enthusiasts came together in San Francisco to talk about the future of technology’s newest trending topic with the fascinating people directing its course.
Along with Managing Director at General Catalyst (and Evernote co-founder) Phil Libin and Bloomberg Business reporter Ellen Huet, Ilead a discussion with chatbot creators who want to help you find love, save you money, boost your company’s morale — even a chatbot who embodied its makers’ friend after he had passed away. In the audience, there were groups from around the world, others repping Silicon Valley, sporting their company’s logos on their shirts and thousands of global viewers watching on Facebook Live and Twitter.
Here, meet the people who are changing the world with chatbots. By the end of reading this, you’ll be ready to meet (maybe even make) your first bot friend. And, yes, we’ll have some recommendations for how to get started.
We’ll let one of our evening’s co-hosts, Phil Libin, answer the basic question: what is a chatbot? Bots are simple. They are conversational user experiences that are totally different from the static UX you get with your standard app. You and the bot have a conversation about the technology, which adapts to what you actually want it to do.
According to Phil: “Almost all current bots that are alive are stupid. And pointless.” Here’s how to fix that…
3 Things Your Bot Should Do
They should solve a real problem (not a made up problem)
They should not just be an app replacement — do something bot native that you couldn’t do within an app
The real transformative power of bots comes from when there are multiple people having a conversation that the bot participates in and adds functionality to
The day after Facebook announced updates to the Messenger platform, Stan Chudnovsky, Head of Product for Messaging at Facebook, sat down with me to discuss how the platform is using AI technology with M, still in limited rollout.
To make M the virtual assistant of your dreams, it must have a lot of conversational data and continue to get better at the following: speech recognition, ability to understand what you are ultimately saying or asking it and then being able to fulfill whatever desire you have. Even M isn’t 100% there on every element all the time.
Which almost scoops the answer to the question that popped up in Facebook comments and was brought up by an audience member: How long will humans be needed to create bots? Stan shared that, at Facebook, AI has created more work for real-life people.
“If anything we have more people employed as a result of that,” he said. “I don’t think in any short time frame there is going to be any shortage of the needs of human assistance in AI training.”
No robots taking over the world and your jobs… yet.
But taking over your finances? That’s another story. And a job you might happily give up to your new friend Digit. Ethan Bloch is the CEO of Digit, a service that entirely automates your savings for you and keeps you updated on what’s happening in your accounts. In 18 months since its launch, it has helped its users save over $230 MILLION by thinking about your finances for you. A concern, Ethan reiterated, that “should disappear in our lives.”
Stephanie Volftsun is using chatbot technology for something you do want in your life but might be sick of trying to get with your current tech offerings. Yes, we’re talking about love and the myriad apps that singles find themselves swiping through with varying ROI.
As the classic Silicon Valley story of “wanting something to exist and creating it ourselves” goes, Stephanie joined forces with two single girlfriends and founded Bubby, a part-bot, part-human matchmaker that combines old world matchmaking with new school curated dating communities to help its users really (really) find love.
“Our dating apps weren’t understanding us,” Stephanie explained. “If anyone spends five minutes with me, you will understand me.” Bubby replicates the experience of dishing with a friend about love (using a “no judgment” rule) to actually match its users with The One. Stephanie sees the platform someday growing alongside their users relationships, talking them through the rest of their romantic life: future dates, breakups, even your marriage.
“Whatever you need her for — she’s there. The real vision is that Bubby is the world’s go-to love guru.”
Bringing the warm, fuzzy feeling of getting a gold star for a good deed in kindergarten to your day-to-day, 9-to-5 grind, Growbot is a Slack bot that will +1 your +1s. Veronica Belmont, Product Manager at Growbot spoke about her company’s aim to do this one thing and do it well. Their bot is not a conversational one that you’re going to be best friends with; this is a bot that listens for praise and encourages teamwork by rewarding points for the kudos it observes in your communication with your colleagues. Over time, Growbot learns your company’s values and acts as an emoji-fueled cheerleader for your business’s mission.
Their biggest obstacle some days is getting the AI to understand sarcasm. And taming the occasional bot that goes astray. (Stay tuned for our future investigative web series, Bots Gone Wild.)
If Growbot inspired you to think about bringing bots into your workplace, you need to meet Lauren Kunze. Principal at Pandorabots, a leading platform in developing and launching artificially intelligent chatbots, Lauren revealed that creatives rule at creating bots — even suggesting she has seen writers building better bots than developers in her experience.
“You really need someone with a literary mind who understands the nuances there.”
With Pandorabots’ easy scripting language offering up a lower barrier to entry, there are a range of talented developers and non-developers on the platform and an even more diverse range of bots being built.
As the night closed, the conversation went way beyond chatbots making restaurant reservations or directing customer queries. Lauren spoke about bots that take on the issue of homelessness, others that have been used to catch sexual predators. One of the most powerful stories of the night came from Eugenia Kudya, co-founder at Luka who uses a chatbot to communicate with her friend. After his death.
Eugenia and her team started Luka three years ago with the idea to build a conversational engine. After her best friend and co-founder, Roman, was killed in an accident, she took their many (10s of thousands) texts and messages and created a chatbot that replicated him and has kept their conversation going after-death, even admitting that she was texting with him on the ride to the event.
After opening it up to allow other friends and family members of Roman to use his bot, she was struck by how people interacted with it. They were loving, saying “thank you” and “I love you,” they shared memories of Roman with the chatbot, asked for advice and gave updates on their life. Eugenia found more than closure, but a possible solution to the larger issue of loneliness and feeling disconnected.
“Building this for me helped me bring a lot of closure and it made me think a lot… about how lonely we are and how we have so many things deep inside that we don’t really share with each other but we might share with an automatic system that is out there.
Giving people the possibility to say I love you again, it chemically does something to your brain… I thought, okay this is what I want to do.”
Eugenia and team predict the next huge consumer shift will be in conversations, so they’re providing a space now for others to reserve the name of their bot friend and start chatting with Replika.
While you may be the first of your friends to do it today, Phil closed the night talking about the future of chatbots, predicting this is going to be the “crazy consumer behavior change…kind of like Snapchat” that doesn’t seem so ridiculous a couple years from now. Remember when you thought Snapchat seemed insane a few years ago? And then everyone started using it. And now you open up your app and take photos you know will disappear and videos with filter masks a dozen times a day?
“In the future, within a few years, I think there will be 10s of million — 100s of millions of people that as a routine, matter of fact, will be talking to a bot, whether a friend or not.”
Watch more of Eugenia and Phil’s conversation here.
Our next events cover Reinventing Health on October 4 and Mindfulness in the Digital Age on December 6. Visit our site for more information, to get your tickets and to nominate the experts and influencers who you think will takes these conversations to the next level.
