Chatbots

This week we discussed chatbots in class. I have mixed feelings about chatbots…I like them for the most part. I implemented one on this site and it was fun to learn about and it’s useful. There are companies that implement them for various customer service applications, but at times those are not well executed. Amazon has one that is pretty good; it is hard to tell when you are chatting with a bot and a human. I had to use one for a medical insurance provider and it was an absolute nightmare…you had to use very specific phrases and it did not seem to like any background noise or handle someone coughing in the background well. Marriott hotels was another one that was difficult to use…they only wanted three or four choices and anything else needed a human to answer.

I think it’s good for companies to implement chatbots for their customer service roles, however it has to be done well. If they are not using machine learning to handle free flowing speech, then I would rather have a phone tree honestly.

Another thing we discussed in class was sentiment analysis in chatbots. I have yet to experience these and it would be interesting to see what would happen if you just cussed out the bot…would it just direct you to a human or hang up on you?

Overall I like chatbots and see a use for them in the future for most customer service roles. I am not sure they will replace humans in every role, but there are definitely some that it will.

Posted on December 6, 2019 at 3:07 pm

1 Comment

Comments (1)

  1. Lexi Reply

    December 8, 2019 at 9:00 pm

    Nice blog here! I like that you implemented your own chatbot on this site and it was fun to interact with. I did find an article about at least 1 case where someone found that swearing at bot got the customer to a human: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/z444dx/if-you-swear-at-apple-s-automated-customer-service-they-ll-put-you-through-to-a-human

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