Conversations4Life
In the midst of a pandemic the pressure for information fast keeps increasing.
We are living in very uncertain times and the demand for answers as the landscape around us evolves drastically (every hour), can make it hard to keep up with everything. Can I travel? Can I see my friends? How long will it be till I can get my hair cut? Can I go to the gym? there is a plethora of questions that everyone wants answers for. So what do we do? read every news article? watch all the daily announcements? Call our help lines? Dig through websites?. Conversing to friends/families/colleagues using digital platforms whilst most of the world is in lockdown has become the norm now. We chat to people regularly, we video call but at some point we get tired and need our “own time” we can only work so much, right?
By now most of us have used a chatbot, digital agent, virtual assistant, digital employee there are so many names with a multitude of different avatars and personas but they all have something in common they are available all the time (99.99% 😜) and if “treated well” are always learning, getting better and able to answer your questions. We have seen the demand for such digital platforms also sky rocket through these times, it makes sense right now to invest in technology that can get information to customers as quickly as possible. Having been a Customer Services Representative, I am well aware of the repetitive nature of questions I have had to deal with and over time it can become unsatisfying to repeat the same thing over and over and over again, I’d much rather be answering more challenging questions. That’s where a virtual assistant is ideal, having customers ask there questions either textually or even more naturally with voice will become the norm at some point (if not already).
It can be difficult to sift through a companies website as it grows, it is now easier than ever to naturally type a query and be presented with a link which can scroll you to the exact location of what you wanted. It’s easy enough to develop this through anchors or leveraging machine learning such as Google Knowledge connectors to give your customers what they want as efficiently as possible.
Tools like Google’s Dialogflow and Microsoft Bot Framework to name just two have made it significantly easier for the average developer to get ‘Good’ virtual assistants to the market in record time. The natural language processing(NLP) engine is always constantly updated whether that be Googles offering or Microsoft’s LUIS and offered as a service.
There are benefits of both platforms and that’s why they co-exist. When working with virtual assistants the content and whether or not the resultant answers are accurate plays a huge role in the retention and trust a customer places in your bot. It’s important to constantly update the utterances (the way people ask a question) and ensure the NLU model being trained has the correct keywords for a specific intent. I like to think of training a virtual assistant like a baby and as time goes on it get’s smarter. The amount of time you give to it with the proper teaching will result in a faster rate of learning, therefore it is important to get content uploaded fast.
This is where I found a small gap in this process for Dialogflow which could be improved. Excel/CSV files can be used to maintain a knowledge base especially for small scale project, of course with enough time this can all be hooked into a CMS but for a small start up wanting to get something out fast a CSV file would suffice. Dialogflow has always provided users the option to upload JSON files with an appropriate structure to quickly populate intents but the issue is that creating this structure without an automation tool can literally take forever and so that’s where Conversations4Life comes into play.
Being able to convert a CSV file into a ZIP archive that is importable directly to Dialogflow with a click of a button will save you valuable time to ensure that you can train your “baby” as fast as possible ensuring that it’s learning as quickly as possible and giving your customers the satisfaction of not having to wait on hold or in a queue for hours.
This simple tool is intended to work with the much awaited Dialogflow Messenger. This front end UI is simple, clean and best of all a free integration as part of the Dialogflow offering. Currently Conversations4Life supports only suggestion chip response types in regard to rich messages as links is a common functionality with highest value. Over time the intention is to build this out to support other rich messages as well.
As you can see this process is simple to follow and allows non-technical people to upload content without the need for a developer. It’s now easier than ever to hand over the bot to your content team to continue optimisation and only talk to a developer when more complicated work needs to be done with fulfilment's or web hooks.
I hope this site I have created: Conversations4Life “https://www.conversations4life.co/” is helpful for your next Virtual Assistant project!
