Tag Archives: Chat

AI, Technology

Amazon and Microsoft Drinking their own AI Chatbot Champagne?

Leave a comment

A relatively new medium of support for businesses small to global conglomerates becomes available based on the exciting yet  embryonic [Chabot] / Digital Agent services.   Amazon and Microsoft, among others, are diving into this transforming space.  The coat of paint is still wet on Amazon Lex and Microsoft Cortana Skills.   MSFT Cortana Skills Kit is not yet available to any/all developers, but has been opened to a select set of partners, enabling them to expand Cortana’s core knowledge set.  Microsoft’s Bot Framework is in “Preview”  phase.  However, the possibilities are extensive, such as another tier of support for both of these companies, if they turn on their own knowledge repositories using their respective Digital Agents [Chabot]  platforms.

Approach from Inception to Deployment

  • The curation and creation of knowledge content may occur with the definition of ‘Goals/Intents’ and their correlated human utterances which trigger the Goal Question and Answer (Q&A) dialog format.  Classic Use Case.  The question may provide an answer with text, images, and video.
  • Taking Goals/Intents and Utterances to ‘the next level’ involves creating / implementing Process Workflows (PW).    A workflow may contain many possibilities for the user to reach their goal with a single utterance triggered.  Workflows look very similar to what you might see in a Visio diagram, with multiple logical paths. Instead of presenting users with the answer based upon the single human utterance, the question, the workflow navigates the users through a narrative to:
    • disambiguate the initial human utterance, and get a better understanding of the specific user goal/intention.  The user’s question to the Digital Agent may have a degree of ambiguity, and workflows enable the AI Digital Agent to determine the goal through an interactive dialog/inspection.   The larger the volume of knowledge, and the closer the goals/intentions, the implementation would require disambiguation.
    • interactive conversation / dialog with the AI Digital Agent, to walk through a process step by step, including text, images, and Video inline with the conversation.  The AI chat agent may pause the ‘directions’ waiting for the human counterpart to proceed.

Future  Opportunities:

  • Amazon to provide billing and implementation / technical support for AWS services through a customized version of their own AWS Lex service?   All the code used to provide this Digital Agent / Chabot maybe ‘open source’ for those looking to implement similar [enterprise] services.
  • Digital Agent may allow the user to share their screen, OCR the current section of code from an IDE, and perform a code review on the functions / methods.
  • Microsoft has an ‘Online Chat’ capability for MSDN.  Not sure how extensive the capability is, and if its a true 1:1 chat, which they claim is a 24/7 service. Microsoft has libraries of content from Microsoft Docs, MSDN, and TechNet.  If the MSFT Bot framework has the capability to ingest their own articles,  users may be able to trigger these goals/intents from utterances, similar to searching for knowledge base articles today.
  • Abstraction, Abstraction, Abstraction.  These AI Chatbot/Digital Agents must float toward Wizards to build and deploy, and attempt to stay away from coding.  Elevating this technology to be configurable by a business user.  Solutions have significant possibilities for small companies, and this technology needs to reach their hands.  It seems that Amazon Lex is well on their way to achieving the wizard driven creation / distribution, but have ways to go.  I’m not sure if the back end process execution, e.g. Amazon Lambda, will be abstracted any time soon.
AI, Digital Assistant, Technology

Evaluating fobi.io Chatbot Powered By Google Forms: AI Digital Agent?

Leave a comment

Interesting approach to an AI Chatbot implementation.  The business process owner creates one or more Google Forms containing questions and answers, and converts/deploys to a chatbot using fobi.io.  All the questions for [potential] customers/users are captured in a multitude of forms.  Without any code, and within minutes, an interactive chatbot can be produced and deployed for client use.

The trade off for rapid deployment and without coding is a rigid approach of triggering user desired “Goal/Intents”.  It seems a single goal/intent is mapped to a single Google Form.  As opposed to a digital agent, which leverages utterances to trigger the user’s intended goal/intent.  Before starting the chat, the user must select the appropriate Google Form, with the guidance of the content curator.

Another trade off is, it seems, no integration on the backend to execute a business process, essential to many chatbot workflows. For example, given an Invoice ID, the chatbot may search in a transactional database, then retrieve and display the full invoice.  Actually, I may be incorrect. On the Google Forms side, there is a Script Editor. Seems powerful and scary all at the same time.

Another trade off that seems to exist, more on the Google Forms side, is building not just a Form with a list of Questions, but a Consumer Process Workflow, that allows the business to provide an interactive dialog based on answers users provide.  For example, a Yes/No or multichoice answer may lead to alternate sets of questions [and actions].  It doesn’t appear there is any workflow tool provided to structure the Google Forms / fobi.io chatbot Q&A.

However, there are still many business cases for the product, especially for small to mid size organizations.

* Business Estimates – although there is no logic workflow to guide the Q&A sessions with [prospective] customers, the business still may derive the initial information they require to make an initial assessment.  It seems a Web form, and this fobi.io / Google Forms solution seems very comparable in capability, its just a change in the median in which the user interacts to collect the information.

One additional note, Google Forms is not a free product.  Looks like it’s a part of the G Suite. Free two week trial, then the basic plan is $5 per month, which comes with other products as well.  Click here for pricing details.

Although this “chatbot” tries to quickly provide a mechanism to turn a form to a chatbot, it seems it’s still just a form at the end of the day.  I’m interested to see more products from Zoi.ai soon

Business, Development, Economy, Entertainment, Media, Technology

Twitter Trolls caused Salesforce to Walk Away from Deal? Google reCAPTCHA to the Rescue!?

Leave a comment

According to CNBC’s “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer, Salesforce was turned off by a more fundamental problem that’s been hurting Twitter for years: trolls.

“What’s happened is, a lot of the bidders are looking at people with lots of followers and seeing the hatred,” Cramer said on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street,” citing a recent conversation with Benioff. “I know that the haters reduce the value of the company…I know that Salesforce was very concerned about this notion.”

…Twitter’s troll problem isn’t anything new if you’ve been following the company for a while.”

Source: Twitter trolls caused Salesforce to walk away from deal – Business Insider

Anyone with a few neurons will recognize that bots on Twitter are a huge turnoff in some cases.  I like periodic famous quotes as much as the next person, but it seems like bots have invaded Twitter for a long time, and becomes a detractor to using the platform.  The solution in fact is quite easy, reCAPTCHA.  a web application that determines if the user is a human and not a robot.  Twitter users should be required to use an integrated reCAPTCHA Twitter DM, and/or as a “pinned”reCAPTCHA tweet that sticks to the top of your feed,  once a calendar week, and go through the “I’m not a robot” quick and easy process.

Additionally, an AI rules engine may identify particular patterns of Bot activity, flag it, and force the user to go through the Human validation process within 24 hours.  If users try to ‘get around’ the Bot\Human identification process,  maybe by tweaking their tweets, Google may employ AI machine learning algorithms to feed the “Bot” AI rules engine patterns.

Every Twitter user identified as “Human” would have the picture of the “Vitruvian Man” by  Leonardo da Vinci miniaturized, and placed next to the “Verified Account” check mark.  Maybe there’s a fig leaf too.

In addition, the user MAY declare it IS a bot, and there are certainly valid reasons to utilize bots.  Instead of the “Man” icon, Twitter may allow users to pick the bot icon, including the character from the TV show “Futurama”, Bender miniaturized.  Twitter could collect additional information on Bots for enhanced user experience, e.g. categories and subcategories

reCAPTCHA is owned by Google, so maybe, in some far out distant universe, a Doppelgänger Google would buy Twitter, and either phase out or integrate G+ with Twitter.

If trolls/bots are such a huge issue, why hasn’t Twitter addressed it?  What is Google using to deal with the issue?

The prescribed method seems too easy and cheap to implement, so I must be missing something.  Politics maybe?  Twitter calling upon a rival, Google (G+) to help craft a solution?

Business, Conference, Media, Reviews, Technology

Microsoft Skype Explores Additional Revenue Opportunities

Leave a comment

Microsoft’s Skype began rolling out an ‘upgrade’ to replace Lync yesterday.   Are there any additional revenue opportunities for Skype going beyond the Business licensing fee for Office 365?

Look no further than the artifact of a chat, the conversation.    This applies to any chat solution.   Getting beyond the ‘privacy’ issues,  the Skype app may directly feed into a blog using a blog plugin.

This plugin will allow a user to connect to a Skype account.  User defined settings would store Skype creds. in the Blog ‘Settings’ menu.

The plugin will install a new type of Blog ‘object’ called the Chat Conversation, or just Conversations.  For each Skype chat log imported, there will be a correlated [post] conversation.  Once there is a conversation posted, the Blog Admin may go into the ‘Conversation’ post, and update the post with any tags they see fit.   The imported Conversation is, by default, set to a status of Pending.  An accompanying widget will be installed, giving the blog a ‘Skype Conversation’ sidebar widget.  The widget produces a ‘Conversations’ Tag Cloud.  If a tag is selected, the UI will list any  conversations that contain the selected tag.

There may need to be a disclosure manually on the ‘Conversation’ [post].  For each post, the admin would need  to check the box that says as required by law, all participants of this conversation were notified the conversation was recorded and stored with public access.  Conversely, ‘Conversations’ may be set to password protected upon upload.

Alternatively, export the text of the conversation from Skype, import into blog post, tag, and update with Public, or Password Protected.  The drawback is the conversations are now bucketed with all the posts, and conversation tags are not separated from other posts.  A ‘Conversation’ may not only contain text, but audio, video, desktop sharing, etc.  as well.  The limits may be on the Skype client, and what can it export.  Also, this implies the Skype Conversation and all of its components (audio, video, text) may be saved either on the desktop, or the Skype ‘Cloud Data Services’.