June Chatbot News

Chatbots continue to make an impact around the world, from major players in big-bucks verticals to helping fans get involved in their favourite sports. That’s as developers are building the next big thing in chat. See what news is making summer even hotter for chatbots.

Insure With a Chatbot

Starting in Asia, insurance giant Prudential continues to roll out its bots with four now operating across Hong Kong, China, Singapore and Vietnam. They help consumers and businesses in the increasingly automated sector where around 60% of new business is submitted electronically and 51% is auto-underwritten.

Internally, the company’s ‘askPRU’ chatbot in Singapore provides over 4,600 financial consultants with real-time information specific to their customers’ life insurance plans, handling over 80% of agent queries to boost efficiency.

Chatbot at Law

In Australia, the antipodean arm of prominent global law firm Norton Rose Fulbright unleashed their new bot Parker on clients. The bot handled 1,000 conversations on his first day and generated $15,000 in business. Based on that success, the company has also launched a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence that responds on the new European Union data protection law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The bot helps clients in non-EU jurisdictions to determine whether the GDPR applies to their business. Hopefully it will mean we see a few less of those annoying pop-ups, while those that need to respond can do so in the correct manner.

These are just a couple of examples of bots making a massive impact on the business world, and showing the way forward for others. That’s as vendors continue to refine and roll out new products for businesses to use.

The Coding Coal Face of Chatbots

Many bots are moving from traditional script-based approach, where they follow a conversation along a pre-set path to a logical conclusion, to using AI and natural language processing (NLP). These need training with sets of data before they are ready to be used on the public and that training needs to work, otherwise spurious results and angry customers will be the result.

In the UK, Volume has developed its QBox tool for marketers to better train their bots for NLP responses with its conversational solutions. Described as a “Training and Testing-as-a-Service platform for natural language data models,” QBox helps marketers test if training data fed in to fine-tune the NLP engine is working as it should.

The company says that QBox “allows natural-language data model developers to look into the black box (that is vendor NLPs like IBM Watson Assistant, Microsoft LUIS, Google’s Dialogflow or Facebook’s wit.ai) they work with, to easily understand any impact of a change on their training data.” It provides around a 30% improvement, showing that even with smart and AI technologies, accuracy is far from guaranteed.

Rise of the Global Chatbot

SnatchBot is a dedicated chatbot building platform, constantly adding new features and support. The firm recently added LINE as an important new channel for their chatbots. LINE is the largest messaging platform in Japan and across, opening up new avenues for business and social bots.

Getting the brand seen is a major issue for many tech companies and SnatchBot was the main digital sponsor of the recent TechCrunch conference in the company’s home country of Israel. The chatbot builder announced at the event that they would soon be adding a voice integration option to their bots. This is a natural progression for the technology as we find use cases where people don’t want to talk to a virtual assistant, and others where typing away might not be the easier form of interaction.

Anyone for chatbot Tennis?

IBM has been helping the Wimbledon tennis tournament keep score for decades. But with the arrival of tablets for umpires, Hawkeye digital replays and pundits need to drivel over statistics, its data operations have skyrocketed in recent years. This year, using AI, they will automatically generate highlight reels, based on the emotional expressions of players. But for fans, Wimbledon Messenger, is a new social assistant for those off-site using Facebook Messenger. See more about how chatbots are helping fans keep up with their favourite sports here.