The rise of chatbots: More people than ever are talking to robots instead of humans for basic services

Friday, 12 November 2021

When people think of Artificial Intelligence, the image most likely to come to mind might be computers playing chess, or a time-travelling robots.

What they may not think of is a virtual assistant helping new parents get their babies to sleep.

Little Ones is an app that allows new parents to talk to sleep consultants 24 hours a day, via AI technology says co-founder Amanda Snedden.

“We have 12 human sleep consultants based all over the world. While they can answer a lot of questions, sometimes they can get overwhelmed and that is when Lee takes over,” Snedden says.

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Amanda Snedden and Nicky Barker, founders of Little Ones are using AI technology to help parents get their newborn babies to sleep.

Lee , is a chatbot, a text-based piece of technology that is able to understand and answer questions in written sentences.

Customers are able to write a question to Lee through a chat function. The AI will recognise what question they are asking and instantly provide an answer in text format.

The chatbot has allowed the business to grow much faster, Snedden says.

Little Ones is not alone in this trend. Because of successive lockdowns shifting consumer spending online, more businesses are using chatbots to deal with an influx of customers.

Tim Warren, the chief executive of Ambit, the company that built Lee, says he has never been busier trying to meet demand.

At the Ambit offices, Warren places a birth certificate on the wall for every chatbot the company creates, each with its own name and avatar.

Tim Warren, chief executive of Ambit, puts up a birth certificate for each AI his company creates. But demand for the technology has been so high he is running out of space.

But lately the company has been building so many chatbots, space is running out on the wall.

“These concepts have been around for quite some time, but it is only very recently that the computing power required to make these machines work are able to be available to regular businesses,” Warren says.

For Warren, the goal for a chatbot is not to fool people into thinking they are talking to a human, but to make them enjoy the experience of talking to a machine.

Navishan Mendis, a digital conversations expert at Tower insurance, says initially staff were wary about working with an AI. But that soon changed once they realised the machine made their workdays easier.

The most difficult part about this is to get the language of the response right, he says.

“It is very easy to get something wrong with this technology, it is quite hard to get something right.

“We have trained our machines to be able to analyse and respond to thousands of variations on questions, but at this stage you still need to have a human in the loop.”

One of these humans is Navishan Mendis, a digital conversations expert at Tower Insurance.

Mendis says when the Tower chatbot, named Charlie was implemented, there were nerves around the office about a robot coming to take their jobs.

But this quickly changed once the staff realised what Charliecan do.

Brendan Roberts, chief executive of Aider says, while chatbots are currently used for consumer facing AI, we could soon see a shift towards AI technology that people can speak to.

“Almost as soon as we launched Charlie, it cut down the time agents had to spend on calls by two-thirds. It automated the simple, but time-consuming things like verification and gave the human agents more time to spend on specialised roles.”

The chatbot is designed to track what Mendis calls “utterances”, the different variations a question can be phrased.

“How are you?” and “How are you doing today?” are two different utterances that describe the same question.

Natural language AI can identify an utterance and guess what is required to answer it. Charlie can answer more than 10,000 utterances and is learning more every day.

Brendan Roberts, the chief executive of Aider says natural language AI can be a powerful tool for a business.

“I liken it to having a rockstar employee, who knows the business inside out and can give you any answer in seconds,” Roberts says.

While traditionally people communicated with AI through written chat, the time when human speech will be used is fast approaching, Roberts says.

“Previously we imagined talking to machines as green characters flashing on a black screen. Now that has completely evolved to a chatbot, but soon we will see widespread uptake of computers that can take verbal commands frictionlessly,” Roberts says.

AI voice command technology is a rising trend in the United States, where 50 per cent of Internet search is done using voice, and 253 million smart speakers are in US homes.

New Zealand is behind with AI voice command technology, but it could soon become the future for SME businesses, Roberts says.

“The take-up is coming. This AI is one of those tools that has the potential to democratise access to amazing data that will really help the small businesses of the future,” Roberts says.