Chatbots need a personality
blog.myralabs.com
Chatbots need a personality
1–10 of 51 posts
Re: Chatbots need a personality
#2> “I am the psychotherapist. Please, describe your problems.”
"M-x doctor" aside, try getting on #emacs and talking to fsbot. I swear I have seen some of the eeriest exchanges between human and robot in that channel – it's not an AI, of course, but man it fakes it well. As someone in the channel once said: "Someone's cheating on their Turing test..."
Re: Chatbots need a personality
#3"Your chatbot should be purposeful, reflective of your product’s voice, and simpatico with your users. One helpful design exercise is to produce an assistant persona and personality:"
For a business, a "chatbot" or any feature similar to it needs to do one thing and that is solve the users problem(s). If the user wants to do X within the app or learn about Y, the chatbot needs to help the user with that efficiently and better than a human can for the feature to be successful. The "chatbot having a personality" comes second to "solve the users problem."
If the users are completely happy with whatever chatbot they are using, then sure adding in some "personality" might be a good idea and increase engagement slightly, but a poorly-performing chatbot that can't help the user but has a personality isn't going to help the business at all.
Re: Chatbots need a personality
#4Now you have two problems.
Re: Chatbots need a personality
#5"Your chatbot should be purposeful, reflective of your product’s voice, and simpatico with your users"
Agreed 100% but IMO, this is not a function of "personality" but rather a function of deeply understanding user intents. A bot cannot be purposeful if its own designers don't know its purpose from a user-centric perspective.
(Disclaimer: I work on Chatbase, a service for analyzing and optimizing bots)
Re: Chatbots need a personality
#6"Your chatbot should be purposeful, reflective of your product’s voice, and simpatico with your users. One helpful design exercise is to produce an assistant persona and personality:" For a business, a "chatbot" or any feature similar to it needs to do one thing and that is solve the users problem(s). If the user wants to do X within the app or learn about Y, the chatbot needs to help the user with that efficiently a…
I don't know any users that are ever happy with any chatbot. The only exceptions I can think of are Apple Siri and Amazon Alexa, that's only because they respond to your voice and save you the trouble of typing or clicking, not because they have any intrinsic value as chatbots.
Re: Chatbots need a personality
#7"Your chatbot should be purposeful, reflective of your product’s voice, and simpatico with your users. One helpful design exercise is to produce an assistant persona and personality:" For a business, a "chatbot" or any feature similar to it needs to do one thing and that is solve the users problem(s). If the user wants to do X within the app or learn about Y, the chatbot needs to help the user with that efficiently a…
I don't know any users that are ever happy with any chatbot. The only exceptions I can think of are Apple Siri and Amazon Alexa, that's only because they respond to your voice and save you the trouble of typing or clicking, not because they have any intrinsic value as chatbots.
I agree, a lot of chatbot projects seem to be built because of the hype + the team also gets to dabble with some "AI/ML." I think there are very few conversational agents or chatbots today that people use regularly, and of those I honestly don't think many people enjoy using them.
Re: Chatbots need a personality
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know any users that are ever happy with any chatbot. The only exceptions I can think of are Apple Siri and Amazon Alexa, that's only because they respond to your voice and save you the trouble of typing or clicking, not because they have any intrinsic value as chatbots.
I agree, a lot of chatbot projects seem to be built because of the hype + the team also gets to dabble with some "AI/ML." I think there are very few conversational agents or chatbots today that people use regularly, and of those I honestly don't think many people enjoy using them.
I'd much rather have a plain old index of help questions and answers than a chatbot to deal with.
Re: Chatbots need a personality
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree, a lot of chatbot projects seem to be built because of the hype + the team also gets to dabble with some "AI/ML." I think there are very few conversational agents or chatbots today that people use regularly, and of those I honestly don't think many people enjoy using them.
I'd much rather have a plain old index of help questions and answers than a chatbot to deal with.
Building bots is hard: there are few tools available of any sophistication, leading to a vicious cycle of trial and error (with users getting the worst of it).
Remember what the first websites looked like? Everyone was just making it up as they went along. We're in a similar situation today.
Re: Chatbots need a personality
#10"Your chatbot should be purposeful, reflective of your product’s voice, and simpatico with your users. One helpful design exercise is to produce an assistant persona and personality:" For a business, a "chatbot" or any feature similar to it needs to do one thing and that is solve the users problem(s). If the user wants to do X within the app or learn about Y, the chatbot needs to help the user with that efficiently a…
I don't know any users that are ever happy with any chatbot. The only exceptions I can think of are Apple Siri and Amazon Alexa, that's only because they respond to your voice and save you the trouble of typing or clicking, not because they have any intrinsic value as chatbots.
Users are never happy with chatbots, but they can be happy with chat experiences if they never realize there's a bot behind the scenes.