Smartbots AI Chatbots Conference

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Smartbots AI Chatbots Conference - 2019

• Chatbot conference organized by Chatbot Life is
  among the best conferences for all the chatbot
  enthusiasts, bot entrepreneurs, and bot
  investors. It gave a perspective on where the
  market stands today and where it is heading in
  the future. As a co-founder of a chatbot company,
  I found the sessions to be useful to make the
  right business and technology decisions.
  Following is an attempt to summarise my
  learnings from the session.
• Though the chatbots market is cluttered with
  over 1000 players, only a few companies are
  adding real customer value
• Over the past 3-4 years, a wave of
• AI-based companies has emerged, of which a good
  portion are into providing chatbots solutions.
• However, currently, theres a massive gap in
  what these companies promise and what they
  finally deliver.
• The expectation gap has resulted in
  dissatisfaction among the customers and resulted
  in a bad reputation for the chatbot industry.
  Companies that have no real AI expertise are
  claiming to have AI in their product, whereas
• what they have is a simple rule-based responding
  engine. Also, companies are trying to provide
  end to end solutions without a specific focus
  area. I am an AI company, and I can solve any
  problem kind of approach is turning out to be
  a difficult problem to solve.
• There is a small portion of companies that are
  providing real value to the customers. More than
  the technology edge, companies are striving
  towards the right business model and thus seeing
  success. Their solutions are backed by the right
  technology to meet customer needs.
• Eventually, the market will get corrected with
  companies settling down to their niche and evolve
  as an ecosystem.
• Chatbots are best fit for external customers
  than internal customers.
• Enterprise applications of chatbots can be
  bucketed into four categories

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Smartbots AI Chatbots Conference - 2019

• While Conversational IVR Contact Center Use Cases
  are external facing, the remaining use cases are
  for internal users, who could be either sales or
  operations teams or any employee. The value-add
  that chatbots bring to external customers is
  higher than that for the internal customers.
• The reason is very simple. For internal
  customers, chatbots are more of an additional
  layer of comfort which they can live without. In
  contrast, with the increasing number of customers
  and the fundamental need to satisfy customers,
  contact centers find great value in using chat
  and voice bots. To summarise, there is a greater
  demand for contact center chatbots than for HR or
  sales bot.
• State of the art chatbots are at Level 3
  capable of handling variations of conversation
  flow
• Rulai (listed among the top 50 promising AI
  firms) has come up with a mode to assess
  chatbots, which they have termed as VAAM
  (Virtual Assistants Ability Model). There was a
  need for someone to come up with a standard, and
  I sincerely appreciate the effort taken by Rulai
  in coming up with VAAM. Yi Zhang, CTO of Rulai,
  made the presentation.
• As per VAAM, there are five categories into which
  each bot can be classified.
• Human-agent assistant
• Partial automation
• Conditional Automation
• Fully automation in designed domain
• Human-like automation
• The categories can be as Level 1 (Human-agent
  assistant) classified as simple, and level 5
  (Human-like automation) classified as
  sophisticated and smart. Rulai CTO, Yi Zhang says
  that most of the chatbots in the industry are in
  1st or 2nd class, and the state of the art
  chatbots are in level 3 conditional
  automation.
• Level 1 virtual agents (VAs) assist human agents
  but do not take control.

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Smartbots AI Chatbots Conference - 2019

• Level 5 is human-like automation, where VAs are
  recruited and trained. Humans only manage VAs.
• I believe the high-level categorization of VAs
  based on ability is excellent and helps in
  communicating the right message to the client.
• Start small and take along the customer through
  the journey. And dont over-promise.
• Over the past three years, the hype for AI-based
  chatbots has created a sense of urgency among
  the customers and vendors. The expectations about
  the ability of chatbots have gone high. Vendors
  promised to their customers that bots will learn
  and can operate independently over some time.
  However, in many instances, bots failed, and the
  vendors were unable to meet the expectations.
• The realization that many chatbot developers have
  today is to add real value to the customers,
  which gives long term benefits, instead of riding
  the hype wave. It is the responsibility of the
  vendors to educate the customers about the
  ability of chatbots and provide the right
  measures to ensure there is a value add. This
  approach will separate the winners and losers in
  this game.
• Here I have summarized the approach that was
  discussed in the conference. I took the liberty
  of adding my interpretations and understandings.
• Start small with a measurable proof of concept
  with a very well defined scope. Understand the
  real problem area of the client where bots can be
  of value instead of imposing unwanted
  technology. Use technology as per the business
  need. Have a shorter timeline and minimum budget
  allocation.
• Come up with the following documents
• POC scope document
• POC success criteria
• POC timeline

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Smartbots AI Chatbots Conference - 2019

• The full project rollout, in some cases, takes
  from a few months to over a year, depending on
  the use-case. Sensitizing the customer about
  these timelines is very important to set the
  right expectations and tight budgets.
• We are still at the evolution stage in
  Conversational AI space, and therefore the
  timelines are so long. Soon, there will be a day
  when technology will solve many of these hurdles
  and standardize the approaches with the right
  amount of data, and thus, reduce the project
  execution time. I am looking forward to a bright
  future for conversational AI.
• Conversation design is a very crucial step in
  bot building
• Hans Van Dam, CEO of Robot copy and co-founder of
  Conversational Academy, gave a fascinating talk
  about the importance of conversation design. Ill
  write a separate article on conversation design
  here, Ill try to provide a high-level overview
  of the topics covered during the session.
• What is conversation design?
• Conversational design is the first step in
  building a conversational agent. Just the way
  blueprints and wireframes help in developing web
  and mobile applications, it is essential to
  design conversations before initiating any
  technical implementation. Conversation design is
  the process to identify possible scenarios where
  a VA interacts with humans and models appropriate
  VA responses keeping in mind human emotion and
  persuasion.
• Three mistakes in Conversation design
• Three mistakes, as identified by Hans, are as
  follows
• Start with technology
• Focus on knowledge management
• Start with business process

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Smartbots AI Chatbots Conference - 2019

• 6. Expert rewrite
• Use-case Identification
• Identifying the right use-case is the first step
  in the design process. Use-case is defined well
  if we capture the following details.
• Use-case name Ex IT help desk assistant
• Description
• Target user persona
• Identifying the scene when a user would interact
  with VA
• Identifying user needs and bot needs
• Identify user needs and bot needs separately.
  Following is one example.
• User Need
• The user, who works for the finance department
  wants to reset her outlook password. She is in
  the middle of a busy day and doesnt want to
  waste much of her time in this process.

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Smartbots AI Chatbots Conference - 2019
Expert Rewrite Once the dialogues and the flows
are in place, use a professional copywriter to
improve the conversations. Detailed
Conversation design In the detailed conversation
design, identify the intents and
entities. Human-centric design process ensures
cost and time saving during implementation, and
also provides good CSAT post-implementation. Imp
ortance of having a bot persona Emotion is one
of the key components of conversation. Making
sure the right emotion gets communicated can be
handled by the use of appropriate words in the
bot messages. The next question is how do you
define the right set of words? We can do so by
first deciding the bot persona which helps in
picking the right word. Some of the common
personas used in bot building are friendly,
empathetic, professional, complete assistant,
assistant cum analyst, analyst, etc. Adding
demographic features like age, sex, name,
nationality, etc will help further in response
building. To summarize, the chatbot conference
was successful in bringing the right set of
industry leaders in conversational AI space
under one roof. This helped in sharing knowledge
and helped the industry take a step forward into
the future. Author Jayaprakash Kommu,
Co-Founder of Smartbots.AI About
Smartbots.AI SmartBots is a cohesive chatbot
development platform that designs, develops,
validates, and deploys AI-powered conversational
enterprise chatbots that suit the unique needs of
your business.