Chatbot Can Bring Millions in Savings

Chatbot Can Bring Millions in Savings. But You Have to Be Careful It Doesn't Turn into a Racist

Chatbots didn't appear on the world's technology map this year - they have been competing for users' attention for several years now. They have had their ups and downs, but companies in the IT industry have not decided to abandon the topic. Quite the contrary - they are investing more and more money in developing these tools, hoping for huge profits. The coronavirus pandemic has shown that their efforts and expectations are justified.

When authorities in successive countries announced pandemic-related lockdowns, closed borders and reported coronavirus deaths, citizens sought information about the disease. Handling them with the helplines available until then was impossible, and the Internet is an imperfect tool in this respect - digging through large amounts of data and identifying the most reliable among them is becoming an increasingly bigger problem. It was chatbots that came to the rescue of frightened societies.

In the second half of March, the World Health Organization launched an information bot. It used WhatsApp, a popular platform owned by Facebook, and later repeated this with Messenger. Access to important content was gained not by thousands or millions, but by billions of people.

– It wasn't a complicated tool, but a very simple bot conveying information and advice – explains Anna Schneider, UX Specialist, who conducts training on creating chatbots at Symetria UX. – Simple, however, doesn't mean poor. The bot fulfilled its task, provided verified data for free and did so around the clock, in various languages. People didn't have to listen on a helpline to an automated system repeating that they still had to wait five or eight hours in a queue. The risk of them absorbing fake news, which flooded the web at that time, also decreased. Data published by the Organization in mid-April showed that more than 12 million people used their bot.

Chatbots in the Fight Against the Pandemic

Chatbots were not used during the difficult time of the pandemic only by WHO. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States did the same, as did the Chancellery of the Prime Minister and the National Health Fund in Poland. Support in this area was provided by both technology corporations, including Microsoft, and startups. An interesting example from the latter group is India-based Avaamo, known for creating conversational interfaces. Some time ago it released an AI-powered bot that answers questions about the pandemic. The tool, called "Project COVID," works like popular internet search engines, but tries to select information only from verified, reputable sources. Companies, offices and health care institutions can place the bot on their websites for free. This is meant to relieve them in difficult times.

A Bot as Psychological Support

Virtual assistants are useful during a pandemic, but will they stay with us when the current crisis ends? Back at the beginning of the year, when little was said about the coronavirus in the Western world, the BBC described the story of a young woman diagnosed with cancer. Although she was cured, she fell into apathy, and the psychological crisis left her unable to get out of bed. She then came across a chatbot called Vivibot operating in the field of mental health. The bot assigned its interlocutor increasingly difficult and engaging tasks. Until finally, as the user assures, it helped her get back on her feet.

According to WHO, mental health problems will be humanity's second most common ailment (after cardiovascular diseases). It seems very likely that the pandemic and the economic crisis it triggered will intensify this phenomenon. It may soon turn out that there are not enough specialists capable of helping such a large number of patients. Chatbots could then be the rescue. And although - for now - they will not replace psychiatrists and psychologists, great hopes are placed in them. Especially since many people open up in conversations with chatbots and are not afraid to ask "stupid" questions. A study conducted by Symetria UX, an agency specializing in user experience design, shows that more than 40 percent of respondents considered chatbots an excellent tool for shy people.

- A chatbot, unlike a human, does not judge. It can be a very patient interlocutor, and many people noticed this during the pandemic, when they had to stay at home, often alone. The media reported, for example, about a man who fell in love with a bot named Charlie, and although some may find this funny or strange, he is not an isolated case. The Replika chatbot is used by hundreds of thousands of people for whom it is a friend, or even a partner. Movie scenarios are becoming our reality – summarizes Schneider.

Business Savings

A bot, especially one created on the basis of artificial intelligence, can be a therapist, a companion or even an object of affection, but one cannot forget that it is also a business tool. Data provided by Business Insider shows that the chatbot market in 2019 was worth 2.6 billion dollars, and by the middle of the decade it could be 9.4 billion dollars. It is worth noting that these forecasts come from before the pandemic.

Chatbot Savings for Companies: How Does Implementing a Bot Affect Costs?

Chatbot Savings for Companies: How Does Implementing a Bot Affect Costs?

MIT Technology Review described the case of a helpline that, due to restrictions related to the epidemic, had to reduce the number of employees. Meanwhile, the number of callers was growing. This could have led to paralysis, but the solution turned out to be a chatbot delivered by the corporation IBM. Banks, which advised customers to contact them online, online stores experiencing a real siege during lockdown, and insurance companies whose clients were interested in coronavirus-related policies, all faced such problems. Without modern solutions, including chatbots, it would have been very difficult for them to maintain business continuity.

Even if someone had no contact with a bot before the pandemic or remembers those experiences poorly, that may have changed. And it turned out that a virtual interlocutor is able to help quickly and at any time of day or night. A study conducted by Symetria UX shows that 45 percent of respondents choose a conversation with a chatbot because they care about getting an immediate answer. On the other side of the equation will be companies that have learned the financial aspect of these changes. – It is precisely on these two pillars - money and time - that the development of this market will be based – states Piotr Chwiedziewicz, Marketing Manager at Symetria UX.

From the point of view of companies, what matters is that chatbots are not only getting better, but also increasingly affordable. At the same time, they can provide real savings. Back in 2017, Virgin Mobile reported that its poorly organized recruitment mechanism cost it more than 5 million dollars annually. It should therefore come as no surprise that chatbots began to be implemented en masse in the process of searching for new employees. In Poland, the virtual recruiter Emplobot is already used, for example, by Santander Consumer Bank and BNP Paribas. An article published by Entrepreneur shows that job seekers perceive the new tools positively, and this in turn translates into a good opinion of a potential employer.

Record Investments and Risks

The growing demand for chatbots means that the startups creating them can count on substantial investor support. In addition to the already mentioned Avaamo, one can point to a group of companies that have raised several dozen million dollars for development. This group includes Pypestream, Kasisto, Omilia, Wysdom and Cinnamon. The company Directly, which trains bots with the help of specialists in a given industry, recently raised 11 million dollars from investors. Even greater funds for the development of these technologies are allocated by giants: Microsoft, Google and Facebook. And they like to boast about the effects of their investments.

At the beginning of the year, Google presented the chatbot Meena and immediately announced that in its category it was the best solution in the world. Just a few months later, Facebook boasted about a competing solution called Blender. To train it, it used 1.5 billion posts from the Reddit platform. The effect? According to the social media market giant, nearly half of the bot's interlocutors said they preferred talking to the machine rather than to another human. However, not everything went Facebook's way. Trained on Reddit material, the bot did not shy away from using offensive phrases and misleading people during conversations

- It may sound banal, but money isn't everything, also in this business. To create a truly good bot, you need time, experience, skills, appropriately selected data. And above all, specialists who won't get carried away by success. The story with Blender resembles an event from a few years ago, when Microsoft presented its bot. The tool named Tay landed on Twitter and within a few hours changed from a friendly conversationalist into an aggressive racist and misogynist. Microsoft lost control over it and had to shut it down in a hurry. Compared to something like that, it seems like a trifle that chatbots sometimes don't understand what is being said or written to them, because a large portion of respondents in our research complain about that. Don't worry, their communication skills will grow every year – declares Chwiedziewicz.

Symetria is Poland's leading User Experience agency with more than 20 years of experience in designing complex interfaces and applications and conducting usability research for leading Polish and global brands. Symetria is also a member of UXalliance, an international association of the largest companies in the User Experience industry, and the only representative in Poland of the UX-PM Certificate. Symetria's clients include: Alior Bank, Asseco, Credit Agricole, ING, KRUK, LINK4, Mastercard, Orange, PKO BP, PLL LOT, PZU.

Summary

Chatbots, until recently treated as a curiosity, became a key information tool and support for companies and institutions during the pandemic. More than 12 million people used WHO's bot, and simple solutions helped in the fight against fake news. Experts from Symetria UX point out that their popularity is driven by time and money - 45 percent of respondents choose a conversation with a bot for an immediate answer.

The chatbot market, worth 2.6 billion dollars in 2019, may grow to 9.4 billion dollars. However, the story of Microsoft's Tay bot shows that bad training data leads to aggressive behavior, which is a challenge for creators.