Lessons learned from building a commercial open-source bot development platform

https://livablesoftware.com/lessons-learned-building-commercial-oss-bot-platform/

by softmodeling • 6 years ago

78 35 6 years ago

bathtub3655• 6 years ago

I've never had a good experience interacting with a chat bot. I find it insulting when a company I'm already giving money to insists I talk to a robot before I get to talk to a human being. Chat bots are just the latest version of listening to a dial in support phone menu and trying to figure out which option you need.

softmodeling8• 6 years ago

I get your point. Though for some people is the opposite (e.g. people that are shy or, don't speak good English and need to interact with an international company) and feel more confortable talking with a bot.

Also, for small companies, it may be the only option as they cannot be available 24/7.

bathtub3655• 6 years ago

I've never had a good outcome (a solved problem) with a chat bot. The best I've gotten is the bot throwing up its virtual arms and pointing me at an FAQ page or giving me a phone number to call. It just feels like a smokescreen to distract or frustrate me.

ddevault3• 6 years ago

I have yet to meet a person who would rather chat with a bot. I hardly believe that such a person even exists.

luckylion2• 6 years ago

If your English isn't good, I believe bots are much worse. You have a point for the very shy. Good customer service would probably be the other way around: a human pretending to be a bot to make the customer feel comfortable while also providing the best service.

mreome3• 6 years ago

Wouldn't a company improving their website be the more reasonable approach though? Rather than hiding the equivalent features behind a maze of keyword matching and sub-par natural language processing? A chat-bot is only going to be capable of supplying information and service that should be far more trivial to just expose on a website via simple forms, user-account features, and F&Q/knowledgebases.

In my experience, most tech-savvy people do not want to call or chat. They only resort to those options when they can't find a way to do what they need to on a company's website. There is another group that wants to talk to a real person regardless, but they usually prefer to call. I'm not aware of any group that wants, or has their needs best met, by talking to a chat-bot.

hw2• 6 years ago

Chatbots, when done right, properly field answer your questions across a limited scope and domain, and allow for an easy exit to talk to a human. As a customer support platform with bots, my company helps businesses reduce their customer support load effectively using chatbots while making sure customers are able to talk to a person if they need to.

As a business, when you have customers asking the same question over and over (shipping questions, where is my order etc), it makes sense for a bot to handle that, and have your staff handle other more specific issues such as refunds, payment issues, or any other questions that the bot wasn't able to handle, or if the customer specifically hits the 'I want to talk to someone' button

My guess is the "bots" you've dealt with are dead-end bots that don't offer a way to speak to an actual person and are meant to make it as difficult as possible for you to actually reach someone. That's unfortunate - maybe it's a business decision (a poor one), or the chatbot just doesn't work very well and doesn't have a way to escalate.

Chatbots have gotten so much flak because a bunch of them try to use as much AI as possible to answer every possible question and businesses think chatbots makes needing an actual human support team unnecessary, which unfortunately is not the case.

mreome3• 6 years ago

But, as a business, when you have customers asking the same question over and over, doesn't that suggest a failing in how you're currently providing (or not providing) that information? Why is the solution a chat-bot and not adding to or improving the features of your website?

lrem• 6 years ago

You forgot the bit where you also have to guess what your options are. Doubleplusungood if it's a voice chatbot that fails at recognizing your accent.

miguelmichelson• 6 years ago

If you are looking for an integrated solution with many other features than only chat to build your support/sales/marketing pipeline take a look at https://github.com/chaskiq/chaskiq

And agree with you, being on development of a chat solution over the last two years I've realize that the AI sucks big time for chatbots no matter how hard we try they will never have the human touch. that's why I have avoided the NLP integration as much as I can. This lack of human touch is the reality of any chatbot that does NLP, sentiments analisis, etc.. they simply fail. I have tried xatkit and I could not establish a proper dialog either.

In that sense I've implemented in chaskiq some sort of path selector / decisional steps that you can compose for further routing assignment to human agents, and that works very well.

amelius• 6 years ago

Ok, so this is about chatbots. I thought it was about botnets.

softmodeling8• 6 years ago

Definitely not about botnets. It's about chatbots or "normal" bots (i.e. components that automate processes, like sending you a Slack message alerting you when somebody posts a comment in your WP site).

smabie• 6 years ago

You read the article and thought it was about botnets? Or you didn't bother reading the article and thought the article was about botnets?

Animats3• 6 years ago

I'd be more impressed if the site had a chatbot to talk to. The actual site [1] is just one of those pages that wants your email.

This seems to be a generic problem with chatbot companies. I have yet to find one with a bot intelligent enough to answer basic questions about the chatbot product. Most chatbots are about as smart as "press 1 to pay bill, press 2 to return product..." with a weak natural language system on top. A basic web site is more useful.

[1] https://xatkit.com/

softmodeling8• 6 years ago

If you head to the examples page (https://xatkit.com/chatbot-examples/) you will see other examples of bots.

It's true the one in our home page is a bot to illustrate a simple scenario with some of the features that Xatkit includes (if you ask the bot for a demo)

Animats3• 6 years ago

    Hi there.
    I can help you get up to speed with a REST API
    Just give me the URL of the OpenAPI definition of your API

    > What is an example of an OpenAPI definition?

    Loading the API from . Please wait...
     Oops, I couldn't parse your definition
    Here is the error message:
    no protocol: Xatkit

What do you recommend that can hold an interesting conversation?

picodguyo• 6 years ago

"explaining why the world needs yet another bot solution"

I'd be interested to hear your take on this. The dozen or so prominent bot startups that popped up over the last 5 years nearly all ended with acquihires. Even Facebook, who once thought they could create an uberbot to do literally anything, have all but abandoned their bot aspirations.

softmodeling8• 6 years ago

To begin with, I think creating a general knowledge bot that can talk about everything is an interesting research concept but not a very useful one.

Then Xatkit aims to be a very flexible platform that helps you create chatbots on top of any platform you need, more than a concrete solution for a specific set of technologies. For instance, most current solutions are tied to a specific NLU Engine (being DialogFlow, IBM Watson or whatever). Xatkit tries to abstract from the concrete engine and let you define the bot in a more abstract way and deploy the bot on any of them based on your deployment preferences.

(this doesn't mean Xatkit provides right now all the connectors you may want, it just means that the architecture of Xatkit was especially designed with this goal in mind, it's open source so it's possible for you to create whatever you need)

ethbro• 6 years ago

The embodiment AI folks seem prescient, here.

How can chatbots ever mimic human interaction, without experiencing human-ness?

We parse incredibly complex dailog exceptions every day because "we made that mistake yesterday" (or "... when we were 5").

netsectoday• 6 years ago

When I spend too much time on R&D building something big and it doesn't work out the way I planned; the first thought is to turn it into a platform and sell it to other people who might find it useful. Then I remember that starting and running a company is exponentially harder than developing a killer app, so the next thought is to open-source and document it and hope people pay me as a consultant... It seems this thought process is universal.

Lessons learned from building a commercial open-source bot development platform

Related Stories