"live" chat customer service

[hannamyluv]

I was reading an article about a website called pandorabots.com. It is a hosting service that allows you to create robot programs that will respond to questions and what not. It is based on A.L.I.C.E., which is AI stuff.

Anyway, I was looking at it and I thought that it wouldn't be too hard to train one of these things to handle customer service on our website. Most of the questions tend to be the same and the answers pretty basic...

What do you think? Would the customer's buy into this being a real live person they are talking to?

[graywolf]

I don't think its a good idea, as customers would figure it out fairly quickly. If you told them it was bot that would be a different story.

I recently played with a recipie bot on AOL (it was from Kraft Foods I believe). It took a few tries to figure out what it was "looking for" but I got the hang of it.

People can read between the lines, and pick up on subtle points. Programs aren't there yet, and don't know if they ever will be...

now where did I put that ELIZA program we experimented with in high school

[cfx211]

I once operated a live person chat for a site I worked on. You will never be able to train a bot to pass off as a human because while the questions are basically the same, people approach the problem from a very personal perspective. Some get right to the point, some back their way into it, some don't know what to ask for. There is a lot of deduction involved in live chat customer service.

If you passed it off as a bot that can answer basic questions, then people will use it, but if it try to pass it off as a person then people will have a very bad experience once they try to get past the basics.

[Captain]

I agree. Live Chat technology is not close to being able to being able to replace human intervention. :)

[zengolfer]

I concur about not using a bot- they don't have the non-linear discretionary intelligence that humans do to answer anything but the most simplistic questions(and may never but that's just my opinion). I wish they did because this would be a great solution.

By the way- there is an excellent live chat tool on this site to look at: redenvelope.com. I think the software is facetime.com instant messenger.