Browsing Tag

bots

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Increase your sales team’s productivity using Kiite, AI powered bot


Kiite is a conversational, AI-powered bot that seamlessly integrates with existing Team Collaboration tools such as Slack or Workplace by Facebook. Kiite, an Intelligent Sales Coach provides easy access to company knowledge, on-demand and 24/7.


Waterloo, ON

About the founding team:
Joseph Fung: Joseph is the Co-Founder & CEO of Kiite, the world’s first Intelligent Sales Coach. A graduate of the University of Waterloo’s Computer Engineering program, Joseph’s a repeat Founder & CEO (TribeHR), and with multiple successful exits.
Donna Litt: Donna is Co-Founder and VP Operations at Kiite. After graduating from the University of Toronto with a degree in Archaeology and Anthropology, she spent a decade optimising customer experiences and business operations in both the nonprofit and ICT sectors.
Rob Chaplinsky: is the co-founder and managing director of the venture capital firm Bridgescale Partners and co-founder of Kiite Inc. Most recently, Rob was the co-founder and CEO of dryft, the industry’s first dynamic onscreen keyboard for mobile devices which was acquired by Apple.

NextBigWhat profiles interesting products and startups (India + world). If you are building something interesting, submit the details here.

Leveraging Chatbots for Talent Management

Chatbots and Artificial Intelligence (AI) together are forming a significant step up for the organisations to revolutionise their work performance. New and smart ways of work coming up which is how the future enterprise solutions are meant to be – simple, intuitive, and engaging.
While almost every industry is advancing with chatbots and automated processes, one of the key change in Talent Management sphere is how chatbots are playing an increasingly interactive role in the hiring process. From facilitating interviews to shortlisting candidates; and scheduling interviews to screening job applicants – chatbots powered with AI are completing many hiring-related tasks successfully and swiftly.
Traditional enterprises, who willfully opt to stay at bay from this technical advancement and continue with the manual recruitment systems, will predictably be at risk. Adopting HR technology is the first step ensure that your company is poised to compete in a candidate driven market.
The evolution of bots into the HR space
Internet bots have been prevalent since the last 15 years. Google’s web spider program made sure the search giant had information from all available internet pages, and then ranked them on their quality and links to other web pages. This was the start of the global dominance of the internet giant.
Bots have evolved in complexity and usage. Today, they are really popular as ‘chat bots’ replacing human interventions on chat platforms. Culmination of AI tech with bot science has made chat bots more powerful with diverse use. From information search to weather forecast, to actually booking tickets and buying products online, bots rule everywhere now. Chat bots have also made significant inroads onto enterprises, and talent processes have benefited tremendously with these technologies.
Talent management starts with qualification of competencies within an organisation and subsequently identifying gaps. This is done in line with vision, mission, values and business strategies that an organisation has worked on. When amalgamated with the HR processes such as recruitment, training, and talent management, the chatbots are sure to speed up the processes while tremendously making life simpler at workplace, with these:

  • Acquiring Skilled Workforce: Chatbots can be leveraged to hire new talent and answer the frequently asked queries. They can be used to prepare job descriptions and post them on relevant platforms online. The chatbots can also play a crucial role in interviewing an eligible candidate. It can ask questions and undertake assessment based on analytical, logical or psychometric parameters.
  • Boosting Retention Rate: Attrition rate is one of the major concerns for most organisations. With AI in place, measuring the retention level of the employees based on data will be possible. This insight will help gauge the failure or success of organisation’s talent management strategy.
  • Filling the Gaps: For any organization, the disconnect between employees and HR or employees and management is a huge alarm. With concrete insights and analytics offered by AI, the flaws can be found and fixed. With the very same insights, the biases (if any) can be overcome as well.
  • For an Improved Feedback System: In the traditional system of acquiring employee feedback, there are forms and sheets. Filling them is a daunting task. However, with a chatbot in place, collecting feedback from employees is both quick and transparent. With an AI-based conversational interface, the entire process becomes simple and automated. It also makes sure maximum engagement and participation from the people of the organisation.

Are We Willing to Let Chatbots Manage and Interact with Our Valuable Asset – The People?
With artificial intelligence and chatbots in the HR division, the operations and processes are sure to become more efficient. From recruitment, performance analysis, expense & payroll management to employees’ engagement, everything becomes simplified, quick and efficient. However our reluctance to blend with the tech advancements may throw us behind others.

Ramathreya Krishnamurthi is Business Head at TimesJobs. A business strategist and a transformational leader, he is known for his strategic thinking skills along with the art of managing complex transactions with simple and bottom-up solutions.

Chat bots – Designing conversations [Part 3]

This article is the third in the series I’m writing about chat bots. Part 1 dealt about the use cases related to chat bots and the part 2 was about some pitfalls associated with building them. In this part let’s discuss about how we can start the process of designing a conversation.
Fancy two sets of conversations
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HDFC hires a humanoid (IRA). Cuts 4,581 Jobs


HDFC has launched robotic assistant IRA.
IRA, i.e. Intelligent Robotic Assistant is deployed inside Mumbai’s Kamala Mills branch and to start off will perform basic functionalities like guiding the incoming customer towards selected banking operations like Forex, Cash Deposit, Loans.

But in the next upgrade, IRA will be able to answer queries related to balance amount etc (via). As an aside, do check IRA’s bindi – surely looks cute !
In another news, HDFC has cut 4,581 jobs citing improved efficiency. The total headcount reduced to 90,421 on 31 December 2016 as against 95,002 in 30 September 2016 (via).
While the two may not be directly related, bots are definitely eating up jobs and will soon replace a lot of transactional jobs.
ICICI too has hired robots which are processing more than 10 lakh transactions per day.
Recommended Read : AI : Hype Vs. Reality

Bots : It’s All About Data And Being Hungry Enough To Collect That

Akhil wants to buy a phone which does not heat up fast, as his phone is to be used in his Uber – always engaged and in sunlight. His favourite e-commerce website can’t understand what he is looking for, yet there are lots of people who want to buy exact same phone.

Welcome to the bot world where user will be able to freely tell the exact problem/ use case and not just be thrown up with some filters on category which 2-3 product people decide should exist.

Where organisations will learn from one failed reply to user to make sure next time replies will be done around that problem.

The biggest self-created enemy of commerce apps as we will see will be imposing filters on users and not let them tell exactly what they are looking for. Its no surprise now to know that maximum books sold on Amazon when it was launched was books which were not available over major Book Stores. When users are given power to express their exact problems and those are fulfilled, we have always seen a huge business building out in that particular space.

How that will be done? Well technology has always enabled organizations achieve what was seen impossible at one point of time and will be easily understood by ones who have first hand experience working in Neural Network or been part of process where humans provide training to machines.

Problem right now for any bot-tech product is getting rich data. And data is very private to each bot or website. Users buying phone over your bot will not be talking or asking in a similar way over Quora. Research and transactions have different behaviour and we already know how user behaviour is different over booking.com and tripadvisor.com.

The only way to collect data is to let users type in whatever they want to and express what they are looking for while training algorithms to use this trained data to find exact goal next time. Fast failures is going to be biggest win in bot tech because more the failed data, more is training, better the bot.

Bot tech right now is enabled by available tools like wit.ai, api.ai, luis.ai etc. , but these are going to be intermediary solutions until bots organisations build data enough to self-train and write their own algorithms for ways they want to solve this problem. Then will be a bot-tech war as we had already seen previously in Search Engines.

What we know today is – it’s not going to be about just algorithms, it will be about data (more).  And we should care more about user providing us whatever free text solves their problem, while providing replies productive enough to do goal fulfilment as well as narrating bot capabilities.

In one of the re-training data exercise, we discovered a user asking ASL from MagicX after 3 successful transactions, what do you think? It’s a win or not for us?

[About The Founder: Parag Arora Is The Founder of Glowing And CTO Of MagicX]

The Future Of Chatbots Is Not Even Messenger

There has been quite a buzz around chatbots and bot platforms since late last year. And this is going to be the trend for the whole of this year as well.

For those who have been aloof to the whole hype around this, I’ll give a quick sense on what’s been happening.

There are a few ways how people are looking at bots :

  1. Chat-based assistants : you need to download an app(or could be an invisible app) where you can chat about a specific purpose or it can be a generic bot. This can be a completely automated bot like Luka(to find restaurants around you) or Digit (to manage your personal finance). Or it can be a hybrid of human operators and machine intelligence like Magic, Operator etc.
  2. Bot platforms :Slack, Line, Kik, Telegram and now Facebook have opened up their chatbot platforms.
    In a way, most of the messaging platforms are fighting amongst each other to be the bot platform of the future. This is primarily because most users prefer text to communicate and they are spending a lot of time on these messaging apps already. And nobody wants to miss out on this opportunity.
  3. Bots-as-a-Service : As Sarah mentions in this post, if bots are the next big thing, then whatever makes bot-building easy and cross-platform will be huge. With all the messaging platforms opening up their interface, it’s still not simple for someone like me, who can’t code, to build a bot and deploy it right away.
    There is a huge opportunity here to bridge this gap and allow anyone to have business logic running over an automated chat interface. Again, it will be a mix of rule based approach(think of having multiple if-else statements) and then NLP piece would come in.

What are we still missing?

Yes, there is a browser too!

Among all this noise, what we seem to forget is one of the widely used app on our mobile device : our very own mobile browser. And the fact that it is possible to chat within a browser as well. All the 2 billion smartphones have one browser or the other.

Imagine this — you are looking to order medicines and you land up on this CareOnGo convBot through a google search.

Or you might want to book a beauty service and MyGlamm bot chats with you and takes your order. Or you can interact with a potential employer over a bot, like how Pipemonk is doing it.

The difference being that you are landing up on convBots instead of the traditional websites.

There are a couple of interesting points which make a strong case for mobile browser being the bot platform :

  • No change in user behaviour : If you are new in town and need a haircut, you won’t go on Messenger or Telegram, you’d just do a google search. Switching to a messaging app altogether for this can be a huge shift in user behaviour.
  • Huge Reach :According to a Morgan Stanley report, US mobile browser audiences are 2X larger than app audiences across the top 50 mobile web properties and have grown 1.2X faster over the past 3 years.

Mobile web experience is frustrating. Why don’t we try and fix it then instead of just abandoning such a huge platform altogether and leaving it to God’s mercy.

convBots on mobile web is the first step in this direction!

[About The Author: Ish Jindal, Founder Of Tars]