Slogans to promote the importance of voice and natural language interaction are everywhere. Many ask themselves, how to keep up with the trend and build a useful, profitable, cool chatbot on their own. The confusion starts with the term chatbot itself, since this is mostly not quite, what we are building, when we are into task/marketing automation or virtual assistants. Most of the so called chatbots are nothing more than just conversational agents and they are not meant to be anything else either. To interact in a dialogue with them has nothing to do with real organic conversation. And users‘ expectations seldomly get met.
If we add “more AI inside” and “ML on top”, everything will get better – that‘s the promise. But in reality we‘re missing out on important efforts and simple strategies to turn a bot into a more intelligent product. Without these efforts and strategies, we can use as much AI as we want and won’t succeed. Why is it, that most of the first Turing test Winners came without any AI and strike us to perform better? They seem to be more empathetic and to understand more than most of the AI bots nowadays. What are we missing out on? Let’s have a look!