
Machine Learning, Chatbots and AI March Into Business Use
The hottest tech trends have exploded out of betas, labs and trials into everyday use cases for many businesses, with a raft of new products or developments. If your business isn’t looking to take advantage of ML, AI and bots, it may not be in business for much longer. Every aspect of business will be transformed in some way by machine learning (ML) and AI. For example, bots are already taking over in human resources with the likes of TalView using ML to find candidates and using AI during the interview process. Other AIs, like Swedish recruitment robot Tengai are being used to help provide fair and unbiased interviews to avoid discrimination, an increasingly vital part of the hiring process. If these smart systems can help get better quality recruits in the door, it can have an impact on literally any area of your business, no matter what the market.

How Social Media Chatbots Are Changing Brand Marketing
The rise of chatbots continues across the digital business world, helping startups address huge audiences without the cost of staffing or the hassle of outsourcing. Chatbots enable educational institutions and support charities to connect to students and their users in a neutral voice about all sorts of subjects. For many, it is easier to obtain sensitive information from a chatbot than from a person. But the biggest leap and change is in how brands and their consumers engage as chatbots become the voice of choice for products, services and goods. Social media as a service over the last decade has given brands massive scope to reach out and engage an audience. But the idea of ‘having a conversation’ never really took off despite the marketing hype and the likes of Facebook and Twitter urging that it was the way forward. Instead, tweets, pictures and posts have been shared to the

How to Become a Virtual Travel Agent
Technology like cloud services and chatbots can help you build a virtual travel agent, with fewer of the overheads that such businesses required in the past. This allows you to focus on offering unique travel packages, create a better personal service while focusing on growing a hyper-local or globe-spanning business, whatever you feel the need to provide. The digital business era is an exciting time for all types of company in any market. Now, banks can exist entirely online, while your local coffee shop or bar uses an app to speed up ordering and improve loyalty. Even local and regional travel agents now do the majority of their business online, and new startups can use the power of technology to build their brand and attract customers. Using cloud services, a startup can scale up faster than any traditional business ever could, hiring online freelancers or subscribing to automatic tools to

Can Sex Chatbots Be Dominant?
Can sex with a chatbot ever be rewarding? With humans always having the upper hand, the creation of a sexually dominant chatbot seems fundamentally impossible.

The 2019 A to Z of Chatbots
Chatbots might be a new technology to many, but they are already a key tool for huge numbers of businesses, providing increasing value to their customers with useful information. Rather than take the grand tour of product brochure pages, here are the key terms to consider when looking for a chatbot suite or tool to build your creations. Artificial Intelligence is a major buzzword. Chatbots don’t need AI to succeed, but boy does it help. AI helps bots better understand the questions put to them by users through natural language processing analysis of the text to discern key phrases. AI can also provide smart searches of wider information sets to help provide answers to more open-ended questions that a simpler bot might not understand. Business use cases for bots are growing, from the established basics like customer service and taking bookings to a growing range of sales and upselling from

Top Chatbots and Lessons You Can Learn
More chatbots were launched in 2018 than all the previous years of their existence, and 2019 will see even more arrive. Here are some of the highlights and issues raised from the recent crop, and lessons that any business can use when putting their future chatbot plans together. If NASA can’t make a smart chatbot, then who can? In 2017, with plenty of hype about interplanetary Mars rovers and new landers, NASA launched “Ask NASA Mars” which has seen plenty of interest recently as the InSight mission gently touched down on the surface of the red planet. Notable for the fact it can be addressed by voice command or keyboard, and through the likes of Alexa. Unfortunately, it is a poor example of a chatbot, merely surfacing stock information or giving the wrong answers to simple questions. With all the excitement of space exploration for a new generation, this is

6 Key Questions Your Business Needs to Answer Before Launching a Chatbot in 2019
Chatbots are a growing trend among businesses, helping with customer services, bookings and sales. But among all the hype any company planning to launch one needs to answer some key questions before committing to a project. Consider these around the boardroom or planning table before taking off. What will we do with our chatbot? Without answering this most basic of questions, there is no point in having a bot. Your team, department or client needs to decide exactly what the chatbot is for, what specific questions it will help answer, or what information it will give out. Once that is answered you can start worry about the many other questions like tone of voice and marketing. Some companies will have a simple decision to make, Pizza Hut’s Facebook Messenger chatbot helps it sell more fast food, simplifying the sales process and reducing the need for apps or phone calls. But

Chatbots to Treat Anxiety and Depression
Nowadays, a major concern of mental health doctors regarding traditional therapeutic approaches (such as visiting the doctor’s office) is that they are confronted with a new phenomenon, specific to our time: the desocialization of their patients, especially the younger ones. Indeed, they grew up in a world where they were much more in contact with screens than previous generations. Thus, they have learned to trust the screens, sometimes more than human beings. However, it is not only young people who find themselves in this situation, since we have now been living for twenty years in a world where the use of computers is commonplace, regardless of age. And when social concerns arise in people who are used to screens, it is difficult to lead them to treatment, because therapy involves a social relationship: the one between the patient and the doctor. This is why new approaches are being invented and

The Big Stats in Chatbots for 2018
Dynamic growth, time and money saved, outlandish health claims, chatbots had it all in 2018. We take a look at the latest numbers that will help drive bot adoption and growing use of AI in 2019. The stats are the stars Most businesses won’t make a decision without an army of stats behind it, and while there are lots of general predictions about chatbot growth like, “Some 25% of customer service and support operations will integrate virtual customer assistant (VCA) or chatbot technology by 2020, up from less than two percent in 2017, according to Gartner.” Business leaders really need more solid information than that. We’ve been talking to a number of big names with chatbots, and while many won’t commit to figures the majority cite impressive growth in use of their bots from customers and growing value overall to the business. Based on that, many see a positive return

What We Learned From Chatbots in 2018
Chatbots continue to march into the public and consumer consciousness as they wedge themselves firmly into apps, websites, and social media as contact points. But what can companies thinking about their first bot learn from an exciting 2018 in chatbot evolution? Chatbots are launching fast The first lesson for anyone considering a bot is that they aren’t new or scary territory. In the last few hours alone, Citizen AI in New Zealand launched RentBot to help those struggling to find a rental property. Rentbot helps solve a common problem around the world, using natural language processing to create a tool for the growing rental market. In Vietnam, Da Nang city has launched an AI public service chatbot to promote easy access to administrative tasks including, traffic, health care, food safety, tourism and business registration. And it’s not even lunchtime, many more chatbots will roll out around the world today, this
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