Chatbots & Future of Conversational AI
In the last few months, I spent some time to get some intelligence which is now available artificially also J. Thanks to exponential growth in AI. From 1973’s Westworld to latest Westworld series on HBO, AI has covered a lot and I believe the day is not far when Artificial Intelligence will penetrate into almost all the segments of our life.
Though Robotics always fascinated me and it will speak a human language I couldn’t able to think back in 2000 when I bought my first computer. There was no way I could talk to my computer then but today I can talk to voice assistants on my phone, laptop and don’t need to type to communicate whether I want to listen to music, play games or watch my favorite videos. The mode of communication is not only restricted to just talking to them but also through gestures or even facial expressions.
There are a few interesting facts which I read recently,
a) We all book hotels for traveling and do it a typical way but for my recent trip, I booked it through their messenger chatbot. Isn’t it interesting? Later I was surprised to read that more than $1 million of a leading travel company’s hotel booking took place through their messenger chatbot.
b) We all do a lot of social networking through various channels but do we know that the world’s largest social networking site’s messenger has more than 300K chatbots operating on its platform.
Not only this as per the leading research organization, by 2021 early adopter brands would revamp their websites to support voice and visual search to increase their digital commerce presence. Also, by the end of this year (2019) most of the retail companies which have their online presence will have redesigned their commerce sites to accommodate some kind of AI.
What all conversational interfaces we see today are mostly limited to those providing a list of options from which users can select. There are many others which use a simple Q&A interface to respond to queries consisting of specific keywords. It’s no secret though that Bots have often been stiff and offered inappropriate responses. For instance, we might say “It’s raining again. Great,” and humans would recognize the sarcasm. A machine wouldn’t.
Understanding language is one component of perfecting chatbots. Another is empathy. A new wave of startups is injecting the emotional intelligence into chatbot-based communication and slowly transforming these interfaces into Artificially Intelligent Agents that can engage humans in natural language. Maybe if we believe in new Westworld series and the current pace of advancement in this space we may soon have robots that will engage with humans the way other humans do.
So far enterprises were busy in building computers which can solve the problems that human beings face and it’s the humans who are fixing all the shortcoming of the algorithms but these AI assistants are flipping the equation by understanding how humans think and respond to the situations. In the future I think one of the most interesting areas of knowledge will be knowing human behavior and psychology and this is the next big leap in AI as we are on the verge of producing machines that can fluently converse with humans so that we won’t be able to tell the difference between a human and a robot.
Though the grass looks much greener, there are talks on How AI will take over Half of all tasks in the workplace by 2025. A recent study from Redwood Software and Sapio Research study said they believe that 60 percent of businesses can be automated in the next five years. Though Gartner predicted that by 2020 AI will produce more jobs than it displaces. Mckinsey Global Institute estimated that 400 to 800 million jobs will be displaced by AI automation by 2030. On the flip side though, the same report also estimates that the number of jobs created by AI may be even larger in a range of 500 to 900 million. Even I believe AI will complement human workers rather replacing it. The AI-based tool can help employees work better. Think of some AI based conversational interface which can save time to a sales manager by generating a review report by making sense out of mountains of sales data. This is made possible as the interface will understand the context, do the intent classification and extract the entities from the business query by the user via NLU and use machine learning and cognitive techniques to provide personal human interaction.
While scratching the surface for some time I thought of diving into it and building a prototype of a chatbot using Rasa Stack (always love open source). If you are interested and would like to give a shot. Please read the next article — Build a Conversational Chatbot with Rasa Stack and Python — Rasa NLU
Disclaimer — The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.
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