Google and the Talking to Computers Chatbot Thing
October 3, 2018
No company wants to do customer service. Money only, please. To achieve the goal of having zero human interaction with other humans, Google continues to chug forward in the chatbot world.
The payoff is potentially huge. Imagine the number of companies eager to terminate full time, contract, and volunteer workers who field questions about products and services. Self service is not reading text pages on Web sites. Just dial a number and interact with a tireless, cheerful, intelligence software system.
Google obviously has not cracked the problem. The company has acquired Onward. This is a startup which had amassed $120,000 in funding. (Yep, I know this seems a modest sum.)
We learned of the deal in “Google Acquires AI Customer Service Startup Onward.” The write up revealed:
Onward’s enterprise chatbot platform leveraged natural language processing to extract meaning from customers’ messages. Drawing on signals like location, login status, and historical activity, it could personalize and contextualize its responses to questions. Onward’s visual bot builder, which let clients tailor answers with decision trees, afforded even greater customization.
Some of these functions have been available in Amazon’s Sagemaker for a couple of years. Like Microsoft, Google seems to recognize the threat that Amazon’s low profile approach to talking devices requires more attention.
Perhaps this will be the next big thing in getting a chatbot to explain why the caching behavior of an SSD drive causes a video render to crash. What change must I make to resolve the issue?
Maybe Siri? Maybe Watson? Maybe one of the chatbot marvels can answer the question?
And, to state the obvious, maybe not.
But $120,000 in funding. Whom can we ask?
Stephen E Arnold, October 3, 2018
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