The main problem with chatbots - long term memory
Every consumer wants a business that’s functional, provides options and is easy to engage with. Slowing down consumer engagement is detrimental to businesses since customers will not want to deal with such companies in future. This is why chatbots have been a revelation for businesses and customer management. To that end, let’s examine what chatbots do and why they need longer term memories to continue benefitting everyone involved.
What are chatbots?
Everyone dreads being put on hold when calling a company. Sometimes all customers have is a simple question, requiring a few moments of support staff’s time. Yet, due to the volume of calls companies get, it just isn’t possible to assign everyone a knowledgeable person at any given moment. But what if there existed a powerful tool that provides answers, tailored to customer requests, that never required putting the customers on hold?
That’s exactly what chatbots do. As ChatBot Magazine defines it: “A chatbot is a service, powered by rules and sometimes artificial intelligence, that you interact with via a chat interface. The service could be any number of things, ranging from functional to fun, and it could live in any major chat product.”
From answering basic questions on a website about a business’ services to managing entire banking accounts, chatbots can solve a wide variety of problems. And with the incredible progress in artificial intelligence, there’s no limit as to what chatbots can help with.
Why memory matters
App founder, Nikhil Vimal, notes that if the goal of a chatbot is to reduce time and increase convenience, memory should be a top priority for businesses. For example, many people use food apps to order in food. Conveniently, these apps tend to store data you’ve used before, reducing the amount of time needed to interact with the app.
Chatbots do not do this, often – requiring users to input every time, even if it’s in fancier form, mimicking the interaction of another person. As Vimal notes: “No one will switch from an app to a chatbot if it only takes longer on a chatbot.”
While improving user interfaces and making chatbots more diverse in their design is important, businesses must be looking wider – especially in terms of memory, to really push the emphasis on customer management and convenience to the front.
For example, Clickatell’s own powerful chatbot technology, Clickatell Touch, provides plenty of innovation in this area. The Touch Cards, based on Touch technology, can be customized to allow you to automate typical workflow processes in your business. This allows customers to seamlessly navigate the processes without the intervention of a call center agent. This is what captures the heart of the modern chatbot and, of course, its future.
Chatbots have a long way to go to being more useful, and memory will certainly play a critical role alongside another compounding thing of how to actually use that memory in an efficient enough way that it can scale properly. If my hard drive were my computers memory and I were conversing with it, accessing certain things can be fast or slow depending on the types of indexing done, and processing that information in a way that's useful can also vary in speed, so a great deal of problem comes from balancing an AI in it's expanded capacity alongside it's diminishing performance for low-end devices. Some central server can be used for many of these, but in some cases it must be local and for those it should also meet certain benchmarks such as compression of it's memory for file size and optimization to save battery life.
I agree, I am working on a chatbot startup and this problem really makes our life harder, thanks for your replay.
Thanks )