You: Hi, where can I get a drink?
Musicbot: I don’t know, I’m the Musicbot.
You: OK, where’s the Drinksbot?
Musicbot: I don’t know, I’m the Musicbot.
You wander around and summon up the courage to go up to another bot.
You: Hi, where can I get a drink?
Jokebot: I don’t know, I’m the Jokebot. Do you want a pirate joke?
A party where people knew nothing about anyone else, where everyone operated alone, independent of each other. No drink could rescue that. In reality, humans at that party would use all those billions of years of evolution to handle all of this effortlessly:
You: Hi, where can I get a drink?
Human: Bar’s over there mate.
Just as a matter of course a human has noted where everything is and even if not could find it with a glance.
Human: Do you want to hear a pirate joke?
You: I need a drink first. BRB.
Hopefully the point is made – chatbots are utterly single-dimensioned. They know what they know and nothing else. But humans are another story… we have reference points to thousands, even millions of things.
So how do you cope with what’s currently happening in larger organisations? Chatbots are surfacing everywhere and allowing inquisitive humans to ask anything. Chatbots are arriving as part of applications that business users are selecting and then IT and Marketing are having to work out how not to drive people down questioning cul-de-sacs while keeping a single voice. The IT bot has no idea what the HR bot can answer. Also, they could be built in different vendor techs because business applications come with them embedded.
Enter our Conversational Hub (sound of trumpet). Our hub knows about all your bots and channels and monitors their response confidence. If a bot is low in confidence, the Hub polls all the others for the most confident answer and either suggests a switch to that bot or automatically shows the answer.
You: Hi, where can I get a drink?
Musicbot: what’s this guy saying?
THE HUB: Music bot seems in a bad way. All bots, “Where can I get a drink?”
Drinkbot: Over here mate.
