With technology ever improving and ever changing, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is growing by leaps and bounds. With this comes in a form of AI –the chatbot. Chatbots are the virtual assistant that you can “chat” with to help get your tasks accomplished. With technology like this, soon the “chat for help” icons on every website will have you chatting with an AI chatbot instead of a person. Scary? Maybe –maybe not.
Facebook has already open sourced pieces of messenger to companies like American Airlines that can get you started in booking processes. “Oh, you need scheduling? Let me get you there.”
There is an app called Mezi that works to assist in tasks like ordering flowers, finding flights, and hotels. This app involves a one on one relationship with you and a chatbot. AI at its finest. When you think about it a little more, you realize that many of these chatbots are actually taking on the tasks that would normally take up our time and attention. It’s not that you’re necessarily accomplishing tasks faster using an app like Mezi –it’s that your “to-do list” is being handled by someone (or something) else.
Here is an experience from blogger John Brandon at VentureBeat:
The time-consuming part is when you have to log into a shopping site, find the book title (or flowers to order, or flight to book), arrange the shipping, confirm your credit card that may or may not have expired last week, and click the buy button.
I decided to set a stopwatch for placing a real order on Mezi and one on my own. […] I searched for a flight to San Francisco. My own search took about 15 minutes, start to finish. With Mezi? I asked about a flight from MSP to SFO, and a chatbot (plus a human rep) got to work. While it took half an hour to get the results, it took me 30 seconds.
As busy people, we are overloaded with mundane and tedious time-consuming tasks. What if apps like this had even more capabilities? What if that to do list could do itself? That would be revolutionary –and we’re headed that way.
What are your thoughts on this type of artificial intelligence? What would you like to see a virtual assistant, or chatbot, be able to accomplish? Are we going in the right direction? Can we continue to improve upon this technology? Comment below!
