Technology

Oct

2021

Empathy and Chatbots: Not So Exclusive

I have a friend who is a salesman in a high-end clothing store.

I recently asked him how he does it so well. He replied “Think of it like a sixth sense. I can tell how a person is feeling right when they walk in. In five seconds or less (usually less), I can tell if a customer is happy, stressed, or sad.”

How does he do it, though?

“I watch the way they walk. I look at their eyes. I can tell if they came in to browse, if they have something in mind, or if they want to talk. And I know just how to respond so I can make my commission.”

Compare this with an experience I had recently with a chatbot created for a national florist. A different friend had a good experience with it, and encouraged me to try it out. It took me through my order and was quite efficient about it. As I was taking out my credit card, it said “Have a colorful, fantastic day!

Ordinarily this would be considered friendly and perhaps even pleasing. Of course, I had just spent the better part of the last hour looking through floral arrangements … for a funeral.

Sure, this came from a chatbot hosted on Facebook Messenger. (edit: Since this writing, the company has taken funeral arrangements off of the chatbot interface. I did not contact them, so I do not think there is any causal relationship there.) It had no idea what actions I might have taken on the company’s website.

Chatbots are extremely popular right now, though, and more are coming. Facebook released the chatbot API in April 2016; in June there were over 11,000 chatbots on that platform alone. As of September there were over 30,000.

These bots are supposed to represent artificial intelligence. They don’t. Right now they offer scripted, highly structured experiences.

Wouldn’t it have been more appropriate for the florist’s chatbot to wish me condolences, after watching my shopping habits? This should be a no-brainer for ecommerce folks. It ought to be easy for a bot to see what I’m doing and respond accordingly

Of course this still wouldn’t be actual artificial intelligence. The easiest way to make this happen would be through a script. But still. When chatbots actually do get intelligent, things are going to get awfully interesting.

What happens when a bot can examine a user’s actions, derive their most likely mindset, and be able to respond accordingly?

Perhaps more importantly, what will happen when they can empathize with us?

Understanding the Users

The term “digital body language” refers to a person’s combined digital activity. My digital body language with the florist chatbot should have prompted an offering of condolences, as opposed to the cheery thanks it did offer. It’s hugely important to understand what users do online, and not just record what they say.

So why should digital body language be so important to ecommerce vendors and chatbot developers? Because digital interactions are based in large part on nonverbal communication, just like the real-world interactions we have every day. When interacting with people in the physical world, we continually assess and process thousands of nonverbal cues. Just a few examples include eye contact, gestures, tone of voice, and facial expressions. As anyone who has gotten into an argument over text knows, it’s impossible to know what an interaction truly means unless we have access to these signals.

In the burgeoning age of AI and chatbots, it’s just as important for a website — or a chatbot — to be able to interpret these signals.

Sadly, even as important as digital body language is, it is still underutilized by ecommerce. For the most part, it remains an umbrella phrase, covering profile-based personalization and after-the-fact analysis. Chatbot vendors have attempted to humanize their products, and they’ve as yet to succeed. To date they have failed to assess, examine and fully parse the aspect of human communication that’s most powerful and meaningful: The unspoken.

This is soon to change, however. Utilizing and exploiting the power of digital body language is hardly science fiction.

Using Digital Body Language

So what’s the breakthrough? It might sound like it’s science fiction, but it’s not. In the same way as we infer another’s nonverbal signals when we are in the offline world, we can use innovative customer experience technology that can infer the mindset of a customer. In real time.

With the help of these advanced solutions, it is possible to keep track of real-time digital activities, such as hesitation, click-through rates, scrolling speed, browsing behavior, navigation use, and more. This allows retailers to stay ahead of the curve and stop using behavioral models based solely on past behavior. Instead they can capture, utilize and respond to actual current digital behavior. They can quickly zoom in on the psychological needs of each shopper, in order to be more effective when assisting them with the decision-making and buying process.

Machine learning makes it possible to develop models which are able to assess and categorize the mindset each customer has when they visit the site. As they assess this per shopper data, these algorithms would be able to categorize a user’s intent. To do this, they would simply look at the user’s actions. Then using this knowledge, a brand can alter their offerings.

Where do Chatbots Come In?

The answer is simple. If we can look at a user’s behavior on a website, if we can quantify their mindset — and if we can then offer the user customization based on that data, if we can then personalize their experience — then we can code a chatbot that will do the same thing.

Looking at the example with the florist, their chatbot would determine that it should offer me condolences, based on the fact I was looking at funeral arrangements. Not only that, but it would also assess the actions I took on the website — what page I visited, the movements of my mouse, which pages I looked at, which I passed over, which images I lingered on. It would use this data to infer my mindset as I browse.

A savvy chatbot would be able to see that I was simply looking at all the choices on the site, and offer to assist me by narrowing down my options. It would also be able to tell if a more focused user came to the site, ready to buy. It would then engage a subroutine to help guide them through the process as fast as possible. It may also be able to tell if a user would be open to suggestions on an order: For instance, if I might be willing to go with a wreath versus a more traditional arrangement. Either way, it would then suggest some popular options.

Simply put, a well-coded chatbot would be able to do what my salesperson friend can do with his customers. It would sense my mindset and be able to react to it. It would behave in an empathic manner, even if it is not able to empathize in the human sense.

My clothing store friend was not happy to hear about the information in this article. “Next thing you know,” he said, “chatbots will be able to tell your waist size, just by looking at you.”

That’s just science fiction, though. For now.

Oct

2021

Where’s the Killer Chatbot?

by John Onorato

Let’s face it: Most of the chatbot experiences today are pretty wretched.

They’re stilted, artificial and in some cases downright affected. Natural language processing is still in its infancy, and has a long way to go before sounding actually “natural.” Or truly understanding natural speech, for that matter.

This is due in part to the difficulty of designing a user interface around a conversation, which is non-hierarchical in nature. When talking to another person, the steps don’t always flow naturally from one to the other. This kind of design is also fundamentally different than either a mobile or web interface.

Additionally, we have yet to develop a general-purpose AI which can accept a user’s open-ended input.
It is incumbent on chatbot creators, therefore, to pick out engaging patterns of interaction. Building on and around these will enable developers to create whole experiences that will delight the users.

So how do we work around the limitations of a conversational UI, knowing the above?

About the UI

Up until now, User Interfaces have been crafted for a linear experience, not a random one. In other words, after the user comes to the page, a specific sequence of events typically happen, at least in terms of ecommerce.

First they search for an item or two. Those items are then added to the user’s cart. They enter payment information, check out and leave the site.

A chat based UI is completely different from either a web or mobile interface. One of the biggest stumbling blocks is that the customer can initiate the procedure in different places. Say they want to buy tickets for a movie. The customer can ask a bot “What’s playing around 8pm?” Another valid starting point can be “I want three tickets to Trolls at the Regal on Little Texas Lane and Congress.”

So we see that a big challenge for anyone wanting to design a chatbot is that the path a customer will use to reach their goal (in this case, to purchase tickets) is not known beforehand. The chatbot has to assist the user and provide the desired answers without needing a discussion to progress in a straight line.

The AI Factor

The next big stumbling block for chatbot developers is that a true AI that works on a variety of inputs is still a long way off. AIs themselves are not especially new, but they are new to the consumer marketplace. One AI-like construct that bot creators use a lot is the Simple Linear Tree, which forces the user down a predetermined path. New AI routines might also be used, but these are not true AI. They simply match patterns against pre-programmed conditions, in an effort to determine a user’s intent.

Generally speaking, these work well enough when there are a finite set of ways a user can interact with a bot. But as developers are finding out, user input can be totally random. This leads to situations where a bot can get unexpected input that it can’t handle. So without better tools, a better AI, it’s all a matter of hunt and peck. Or worse, finding the linguistic needle in a haystack of possibilities.

The Solution: Modify, Publish, Iterate, Repeat

So how does a bot developer succeed with the limited tools they have? The best path is not already defined, given the variety of inputs. Neither the number of inputs nor their content is known. There has to be a quick, iterative path to successful completion, and it has to be low-cost as well. A developer needs to be aware of how their bots are responding to the inputs provided by the user. With this knowledge, they can then iterate on what is already there. Any blocks between the user and their goal need to be addressed.

Experience has shown that the best tools for the iterative method are bot native. This means they are able to understand the complexity and nuance of a conversational interface, and are able to translate them into clear metrics. Conversely, it also means the user is not simply dumped into meaningless dialogues or dashboards.

Marketing teams can use these tools to pinpoint groups of similar users, then connect with them through personalized messages. Creative and editorial teams can use them to address messaging that may be off-brand or that doesn’t have the desired tone. Business leaders can use them to provide a detailed picture of their efforts without the use of an engineering team and a data scientist just to “run the numbers.”

It’s important to have a conversational UI that’s easy to understand. It’s also important to iterate quickly on this. Being able to do these things will assist business leaders to grow differentiated bot-native arms that can leverage the great power found behind the conversational interface./hea

Jun

2019

Empathy and Chatbots: Not So Exclusive

by John Onorato

I have a friend who is a salesman in a high-end clothing store.

I recently asked him how he does it so well. “Think of it like a sixth sense,” he replied. “I can tell how a person is feeling right when they walk in. In five seconds or less (usually less), I can tell if a customer is happy, stressed, or sad.”

How does he do it, though?

Ordinarily this would be considered friendly and perhaps even pleasing. Of course, I had just spent the better part of the last hour looking through floral arrangements … for a funeral.

These bots are supposed to represent artificial intelligence. They don’t. Right now they offer scripted, highly structured experiences.

What happens when a bot can examine a user’s actions, derive their most likely mindset, and be able to respond accordingly?

Perhaps more importantly, what will happen when they can empathize with us?

Understanding the Users

So why should digital body language be so important to ecommerce vendors and chatbot developers?

Because digital interactions are based in large part on nonverbal communication, just like the real-world interactions we have every day.

When interacting with people in the physical world, we continually assess and process thousands of nonverbal cues. Just a few examples include eye contact, gestures, tone of voice, and facial expressions. As anyone who has gotten into an argument over text knows, it’s impossible to know what an interaction truly means unless we have access to these signals.

In the burgeoning age of AI and chatbots, it’s just as important for a website — or a chatbot — to be able to interpret these signals.

To date they have failed to assess, examine and fully parse the aspect of human communication that’s most powerful and meaningful: The unspoken.

This is soon to change, however. Utilizing and exploiting the power of digital body language is hardly science fiction.

Using digital body language

With the help of these advanced solutions, it is possible to keep track of real-time digital activities, such as hesitation, click-through rates, scrolling speed, browsing behavior, navigation use, and more. This allows retailers to stay ahead of the curve and stop using behavioral models based solely on past behavior. Instead they can capture, utilize and respond to actual current digital behavior. They can quickly zoom in on the psychological needs of each shopper, in order to be more effective when assisting them with the decision-making and buying process.

Where do chatbots come in?

My friend was not happy to hear about the information in this article. “Next thing you know,” he said, “chatbots will be able to tell your waist size, just by looking at you.”

That’s just science fiction, though. For now.

Aug

2018

IP Phones can be Six-Figure Liabilities Just Waiting to Happen

by John Onorato (ghostwritten for Toshiba)

Bob Foreman’s seven-person architecture firm is using the latest technology in IP phones. Thinking they were safe and protected, they went about their business normally, until one day they opened their phone bill to see that they had run up a bill of $166,000 in one weekend. Quite odd, given that no one was in the office at the time.

Based on the firm’s normal phone bill, it would have taken them 34 years to amass those charges legitimately, as stated in the complaint filed with the FCC. But the charges weren’t a mistake. Malcontents had hacked into the phone system of the company, and routed the calls to premium-rate numbers in Somalia, the Maldives, and Gambia.

The Fraud
The firm, based in Norcross, Georgia, is one of the latest victims of an old fraud that’s found a new life, now that most corporate phone lines are IP-based. This swindle is easier to pull off on the web and infinitely more profitable. The targets are largely SMBs, and cost global victims $4.73 billion last year. That’s up almost $1 billion from 2011, states the Communications Fraud Control Association.

Tier 1 carriers have anti-fraud systems meant to catch hackers before they mount false six-figure charges. They can also afford to credit their customers for millions of dollars in fraudulent charges every year. SMBs, though, often use local carriers, that lack these sophisticated systems. And worse yet, some of these carriers are leaving their customers to pay for the calls they didn’t make.

The Law
There are no laws that assist in this area, as there are no regulations that require carriers to reimburse defrauded customers the way credit card companies have to. Lawmakers have occasionally taken up the torch, yet little progress has been made.

How It Works
Hackers lease premium-rate phone lines, typically used for psychic or sexual-chat lines, from one of many web-based services that charge callers over a dollar a minute, then give the lessee a cut. In the US, these numbers can be easily identified by their 1-900 prefixes; furthermore, callers are told they will incur a higher rate. Elsewhere, though, such as in Estonia and Latvia, these numbers can be more difficult to spot. The profit for the lessees might be as high as 24 cents for every minute a caller spends on the phone.

The black hats then crack a SMB’s phone system in order to make calls through it to their premium number. This is typically done on a weekend, when nobody will notice. Using high-speed computers, hundreds of calls can be made simultaneously, thereby forwarding up to 220 minutes’ worth of calls a minute to the pay line. Ultimately, the hackers get their cut, usually delivered through MoneyGram, wire transfer or Western Union.

This plan can be quite profitable, when executed well. This is why premium rate resellers are on the rise. In 2009 there were 17; in 2013 there were 85, says Britain’s Yates Fraud Consulting.

What’s Being Done
The problem is moving fast, say many industry groups, yet they are still trying to tackle it. One slow solution is to routinely input known fake “hot numbers” into a fraud management system, then sharing that with carriers so they can be blocked.

Catching the elusive hackers is hard, if only because the crime can cross up to three jurisdictions. In 2011, the FBI worked with police in the Philippines to arrest four men who used the ploy to collect $2 million in fraudulent charges. This money was funneled to a militant Saudi Arabian group that US officials believe underwrote the 2008 Mumbai terrorist bombings.

Bob Foreman’s firm has turned to the FCC, the FBI, and several other agencies for assistance, yet they are still on the hook for their $166,000 phone bill with their local carrier, TW Telecom. It now includes $17,000 in termination fees and late charges. The telecom’s VP for corporate communications said that Foreman’s firm ought to have taken measures to ensure the security of its equipment.

Mr. Foreman responded that his firm didn’t even understand that this was a possible risk.

To avoid this happening to you, be sure to turn off call forwarding, and ensure there are strong passwords for international dialing systems as well as voicemail. Treat your phones as Internet-connected machines, because that’s what they are. Hackers are already doing that. When you put a computer or an IP phone system on the Internet, it immediately gets probed for a weak point.

published link:
IP Phones can be Six-Figure Liabilities Just Waiting to Happen

Aug

2018

Facebook or website? Self-promotion on a shoestring

by John Onorato (ghostwritten for Austin Visuals)

Marketing and promotion are important parts of any animator’s toolkit. Unless you want to create videos by yourself and for yourself, it’s important to let people know about your work.

Yet there are many ways to accomplish these tasks. You can benefit either from having a dedicated website, like this one for Dunkirk, or a Facebook page like this one for 2016’s Arrival. Many films have both.

Before Facebook allowed pages that weren’t directly related to people, a website was how you promoted your film. A website helped your film attract fans and a following. When someone expressed interest at a networking or other event, it was pretty easy to give them your URL. When they visited, there was all kinds of data about your film: contact information, about the crew, backstage photos, credentials and the like. And the better the site looked, the better you and your project looked. But it costs money.

Creating a website from the ground up, though, is neither easy nor cheap. Today it’s easy to do that on Facebook. And Facebook is free.

Big plus, huh?

So let’s take a look at the pros and cons of each method.

How Much Will It Cost?
For those of us who have yet to create a website, let’s look at the very basics. We’ll assume you’re going to use the WordPress.org content management system as it’s easy to use.

One of the great things about WordPress is that there’s lots and lots of themes (or skins) aimed at creatives. There’s even a number of themes aimed at short films. You can easily use these to make a unique website. Sure, there’s a learning curve, but it’s easy to glean what you need to know. And they usually offer the essentials at a discount for first time buyers.

If you’ve never created a website before, let’s break down the basics. We’re going to assume you’re using something like a wordpress.org hosting platform. (Learn the difference between WordPress.org and .com here ).

For your first purchase, you can get the essentials at a discounted cost:

Domain – Also known as the website’s URL, you have to purchase the right to use JohnsAwesomeMovie.com . This runs usually a dollar or so for your first year, and $10 a year after that.
Hosting – Your site has to be hosted on a server so that it’s accessible to the rest of the Internet. This usually costs $10 a month, or less if you’re able to pay for a whole year up front.
Theme – Without a theme, your site will look like everyone else’s – like you simply dumped a bunch of stuff on a page. There are some available for free, but the better ones cost between $40 and $150.

So to get started with a basic package, you’re looking at between $50 and $160. Sure, you might have that in your back pocket right now, but for a low-budget film, that can be a big chunk to let go of. And that’s not even factoring in the time you’ll need to put in to make your site work right.

What About Facebook?
On the other hand, a Facebook page is free. They’re easy to get up and running; might take you ten minutes. There is no daunting learning curve or fussy plug-ins. And there’s no code to mess with either. But you won’t own the page outright like you would with a dedicated website.

Now if you wanted a website that’s completely unique and new, you’d incur the additional expense of a web designer. That’s a good way to catapult your site into the hundreds, if not thousands of dollars.

Given that, it’s usually best to pick a theme you like and then tweak it so it doesn’t look like the original. Or you could hire a WordPress theme designer, who are generally more affordable than creating a whole site from scratch.

Engaging the Social Element
There is a lot more to having your own website, too. You have to think of discoverability – you might have created the greatest site in the world, but if no one knows about it, and therefore no one visits it, then you’ve wasted your time and money. Webmasters spend lots of time on making pages that are friendly to search engines (also known as SEO, or Search Engine Optimization). They work on the site content as well, all with an eye towards increasing the page rankings of the site. If all that’s on your site is a short film, and no additional content to add value, people will soon stop visiting your site. And thus your site will slip to the bottom of the search rankings barrel.

Even if the video players on Facebook and YouTube are pretty basic, they do get the job done. And again, they’re free, aside for the time you put into content creation.

So there’s a lot of value in examining the benefits of promoting – and maybe hosting your film on Facebook as opposed to a conventional website.

There are a lot of benefits to hosting your work on Facebook. Granted, there are several ways of getting it out there: You can put your film on YouTube (or Vimeo), you can create a website, or you might create a Facebook page. Regardless of how that happens, though, people are at some point going to start talking about your film on Facebook. It might even start making the rounds there. But the reach of people sharing your Facebook page versus that of people sharing your film’s site will be much much greater. One major reason for this is that the algorithm that Facebook uses to share things strongly favors content that will keep a user on the Facebook site. The more times advertisements get pushed out in front of users’ faces, the more revenue Facebook gets. So if a few people watch, then share your film, you’ll probably get more people viewing your Facebook page than if those same people shared a dedicated website.

Now About Your Audience …
Sounds like a done deal, doesn’t it? Facebook seems to win all around. But there’s one more perk to creating a Facebook page, and that has to do with how you communicate with your audience. On Facebook, that communication can be real-time. In other words, you can use Facebook to communicate with your fans on a moment’s notice.

On Facebook, as soon as someone posts a thing, you get a notification. You can’t beat that for ease and speed of use. You can build a following, an entire community surrounding your film on Facebook. And your audience will grow, as communities tend to do. About the only area in which a dedicated website beats Facebook is if you wanted to have multi-threaded forums. Of course, those can be pretty tedious to install. And Facebook does offer the one thread to you, which is great for disseminating information about your project. People can talk about it on there, too; always a plus.

Sure, it’s easy to configure WordPress. It’s even easy to do so on the fly, from your phone. But it’s still not as easy as using the Pages app provided by Facebook.

If you’re making a low-budget short piece, setting up an entire website solely for promotional purposes just isn’t feasible. You’ll be spending money that you’ll likely never get back. On the other hand, though, if you want to sell merchandise (or if you wanted to install forums, as above), a dedicated site is the way to go. Although they are improving it, the merch portions of Facebook are currently pretty fickle. So if you think you’ll have a market for hats, shirts, pom-poms and DVDs of your movie, then for e-commerce purposes, a dedicated site is the way to go.

There is one more situation in which a full website is preferable. That’s when you have a large body of your work to showcase. Using a dedicated site, it’s easy to put all of that work on a single easily accessed page. It’s harder to do on Facebook. Not only is there a river of status updates to navigate, but any additional work has to be buried at least one or two clicks deep.

And let’s face it: The harder people have to work at finding your great Making Of featurette, the less likely they are to actually watch it.

The Takeaway
What’s the takeaway here? If you want to have an entire exhibition showcasing all of your project, then make a website. On the other hand, if all you have is a short film (and maybe one or two other things) then it’s better to avail yourself of Facebook’s great Pages feature.

On Advertising
When was the last time you took a look at your Facebook feed? If it was any time in the last month, you’ve seen a Sponsored Post. These are “smart” promotions.

Facebook Pages looks at what categories a thing is in, and pushes content out to people who have expressed similar interests. For example, if you already follow several different romance pages, and I had a film named “Pretty Woman Redux,” then posts about my film would likely appear in your timeline, since I’ve targeted those kinds of keywords.

You can do pretty much the same thing with a website, but the process is much more involved. And you have to use a third-party ad manager. More money down the drain.

Facebook can be a thing that you either love or you hate. Either way, it’s an indispensable tool for any sort of creative type — even filmmakers! — to promote their work. It’s a great idea to use it for any creative venture.

Technology

Empathy and Chatbots: Not So Exclusive

Understanding the Users

Using Digital Body Language

Where do Chatbots Come In?

Where’s the Killer Chatbot?

About the UI

The AI Factor

The Solution: Modify, Publish, Iterate, Repeat

Empathy and Chatbots: Not So Exclusive

Understanding the Users

Using digital body language

Where do chatbots come in?

IP Phones can be Six-Figure Liabilities Just Waiting to Happen

Facebook or website? Self-promotion on a shoestring

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