Chatbots are one-trick ponies

Roger on 12/01/2019

Are chatbots one-trick ponies?

Yes, yes there are.

And that is exactly how they should be.

When we talk about optimising a web page the discussion includes things like focus the content on one topic, remove distractions, and have a single call to action. Web pages are one-trick ponies and that is exactly how they should be.

A chatbot is simply a conventional interface for surfacing organisational knowledge, in much the same way a web page does in more of a static document form. Chatbots work particularly well when the user’s question or job to be done is too complex to be answered by the content on a web page as chatbots are able to guide the user towards the answer and check understanding in a way that web pages can’t. The more focused a chatbot is on helping the user answer their question, the better service it is providing.

To criticise a chatbot for being too focused misses this point.

Relaunching interniser

Roger on 23/10/2016

As I’ve thought more about bots and what they could be used for (pre-diagnosis for the 111 service and getting info about places to visit) I decided to relaunch interniser as a side project to do all my bot projects under. It seems more appropriate than RogSwaBot which would be fine for more personal stuff and which I may still work on. 

I built a quick responsive webpage in html 5 and will get it uploaded once I’ve set up the domain. And I set up the Facebook page so I can connect the webpage to the messenger service. The next stage will be to start building an MVP bot using a simple keyword response system before I move on to learning Python and how to integrate a more complex AI system. 

I don’t know where interniser might go but it should be an interesting side project.