5 Chatbot Call Center Examples +3 Times You Need a Human

A balanced chatbot call center strategy can drive efficiency and brand loyalty but overdoing it can backfire. See practical examples here. Continue reading 5 Chatbot Call Center Examples +3 Times You Need a Human

Using AI for Political Polling

Public polling is a critical function of modern political campaigns and movements, but it isn’t what it once was. Recent US election cycles have produced copious postmortems explaining both the successes and the flaws of public polling. There are two main reasons polling fails.

First, nonresponse has skyrocketed. It’s radically harder to reach people than it used to be. Few people fill out surveys that come in the mail anymore. Few people answer their phone when a stranger calls. Pew Research reported that 36% of the people they called in 1997 would talk to them, but only 6% by 2018. Pollsters worldwide have faced similar challenges…

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Chatbots and Human Conversation

For most of history, communicating with a computer has not been like communicating with a person. In their earliest years, computers required carefully constructed instructions, delivered through punch cards; then came a command-line interface, followed by menus and options and text boxes. If you wanted results, you needed to learn the computer’s language.

This is beginning to change. Large language models—the technology undergirding modern chatbots—allow users to interact with computers through natural conversation, an innovation that introduces some baggage from human-to-human exchanges. Early on in our respective explorations of ChatGPT, the two of us found ourselves typing a word that we’d never said to a computer before: “Please.” The syntax of civility has crept into nearly every aspect of our encounters; we speak to this algebraic assemblage as if it were a person—even when we know that …

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Whatfix nabs $90M to help workers onboard and get the most out of their IT stacks

“Digital transformation” has been on the mind of many an organization in the last year: the pandemic and the shift it’s brought to how we work are speeding up investments in new apps, infrastructure and work practices to improve productivity regardless of where we sit all day. Now, it looks like we’re on to the […] Continue reading Whatfix nabs $90M to help workers onboard and get the most out of their IT stacks

Chatbots, Maintenance and Monitoring: Security Automation

Last week the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) unveiled its virtual victim assistant, ViViAN, to serve identity crime victims after-hours and on weekends. Developed in partnership with the SAS Institute, an anti-fraud software and services compan… Continue reading Chatbots, Maintenance and Monitoring: Security Automation

Moveworks expands IT chatbot platform to encompass entire organization

When investors gave Moveworks a hefty $75 million Series B at the end of 2019, they were investing in a chatbot startup that to that point had been tuned to answer IT help question in an automated way. Today, the company announced it had used that money to expand the platform to encompass employee questions […] Continue reading Moveworks expands IT chatbot platform to encompass entire organization