Voice Chatbots: the customer service automation revolution. Luca Pradovera, Real Time Application Engineer, Mojo Lingo. Presented at TADSummit 2016, 15-16 Nov, Lisbon in Stream 4, Contextual Comms, Conversational CRM, BOTs, reviews the practical impact of the changes happening to communications. Messaging and IP Communications as a Platform providers are diversifying the options for communications, and how businesses communicate with their customers. We are only at the early stages of this change, however, multi-channel communications, session management, automation (BOTs) and real-time analytics are delivering business results today. Attendees can learn from leading implementers where to focus efforts, and not get taken-in my the weak-minded marketing BS plaguing in this space. The future of call center "first line of defense" software will be served by context-aware, sentiment analysis capable bots that are almost undistinguishable from low-skilled operators, and more precise in many cases. Leveraging APIs such as IBM Watson and Google Speech makes it possible to build voice and text chatbots that can interact with the context, extract entities, and provide services to callers. Those agents can be made available though telephony, WebRTC, text messages and chat services. The presentation will include insights about the various APIs and channels, gathered from Mojo Lingo's latest projects, a look into the near future of call center agent automation, and a demo.

1. ENSURING
SUCCESS OF
CHATBOT
SOLUTIONS
Luca Pradovera
TADSummit 2016
Lisbon, Portugal

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WHO AM I?
• Luca Pradovera
• New Principal/Lead at Mojo Lingo LLC
• Co-author of Adhearsion
• Played with phones since I was 8
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WHAT CAN MOJOLINGO DO FOR YOU?
• Asterisk and FreeSWITCH consulting
• Application development
• WebRTC applications
• Instant messaging
• Chatbots and AI
• The right tool for the job, always.
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TALK TO THE MACHINE
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WHAT IS A CHAT BOT?
• Conversational, automated interface to services
• Provides a natural language approach to a set of
features
• Usually text-based
• Will replace agents in many situations
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SOME NUMBERS
• 75% of call center operators will be replaced by bots
within 2025 (Deloitte)
• WeChat sales represent 30% of the ecommerce
market in China (Gartner)
• 22% of Facebook users interact with a bot on a
weekly basis (Facebook)
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CHATBOTS MARKET POTENTIAL
• Customer service
• Inbound call centers
• Ecommerce
• Any time there is a need for “triaging”
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WHAT DO BOTS DO BEST?
• Access to shared knowledge
• Context awareness
• Cost effective
• Consistent interactions
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CHATBOTS WILL FIX EVERYTHING!
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WHAT DO BOTS DO WORST?
• Handling unexpected situations
• Endless looping
• Bad at understanding language
• Not knowing when to quit
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CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE IS KING
• Interaction design is very important
• Solve solvable problems!
• Target vertical markets
• Use analytics, quantitative AND predictive
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DESIGNING BOT INTERACTIONS
• Average session time is 68 seconds
• Average number of messages sent per session is 10
• Account for synonyms and common phrases (most
common words are variations of “hi”) (all data by
dashbot.io)
• Design for what your users really do
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REAL TIME FEEDBACK
• “Do no harm to humans”
• Conversation flow gauging
• NLP is still an important tool
• “Satisfaction threshold” metric
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THE SATISFACTION THRESHOLD
• Still testing various models
• Number of interactions in the session, or above
average time
• Repeated requests are a red flag
• Tone analysis in voice, sentiment analysis in text
• Do not be afraid to “quit”
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IBM WATSON CONVERSATION
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IBM WATSON
• Provides multiple services
• Text-to-speech and speech-to-text
• Conversation API
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THE IBM WATSON CONVERSATION API
• Text-based chatbot tool
• Can be used on Bluemix or stand-alone
• Uses intents, entities, and dialogs
• Can do contextual communication or stateless
requests
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CONVERSATION BASICS/INTENTS
•Intents are the phrases a user
can say
•Watson will ask for examples
to improve the recognition
•Results in a tag identified by #
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CONVERSATION BASICS/ENTITIES
•Entities are lists of recognizable values
•Similar to a grammar
•They provide values for a context
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CONVERSATION BASICS/DIALOGS
•Dialogs tie everything
together
•Provides transitions based
on intents and entities
•Specifies text for the
conversation
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WATSON TEXT-TO-SPEECH
•More of a transcription engine than grammar-based
ASR
•Streaming HTTP, session-less REST, Websocket, and
async API
•Allows for custom language models
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ALCHEMY API
• Entity extraction
• Sentiment analysis
• Keyword extraction
• Much more!
• Used to create conversational trees from existing
knowledge
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THANK YOU!
My name is: Luca Pradovera
I am a Voice Application Developer
at Mojo Lingo.
Web: https://mojolingo.com
Twitter: @lucaprado
GitHub: lpradovera
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