ncubeeight

Back in 2005-2006 my friend Liesl told me about the coming age of chat bots.  I had a hard time imagining how people would embrace products that simulated human voice communication but were less “intelligent”.  She ended up building a company that allowed people to have polite automated service agents that you could program with a certain specific area of intelligence.  Upon launch she found that people spent a lot more time conversing with the bots than they did with the average human service agent.  I wondered if this was because it was harder to get questions answered, or if people just enjoyed the experience of conversing with the bots more than they enjoyed talking to people.  Perhaps when we know the customer service agent is paid hourly, we don't gab in excess.  But if it's chat bot you're talking to, we don't feel the need to be hasty? Fast forwarding over a decade later, IBM has acquired her company into the Watson group.  During a dinner ...