Baffled by bots? One of Australia’s top experts explains how the tech helps marketers
Mark Halstead is the MD of iCumulus, the digital direct response agency that now builds and trains chatbots for clients. Here, he gives his jargon-free guide to how artificial intelligence works, and how it can be used to generate leads, save businesses money and ensure customer-service queries are that little bit less painful.
Today’s chatbots differ from older models because they’re intelligent – they’ve got a brain, which means they can interpret written text and speech. The technology has been quietly improving over the last few years, and it’s gone mainstream because it’s now so much more accurate. Think about how good the “did you mean” feature is on Google today. That’s all so important because if the bot’s not right, people won’t use it.
Mark Halstead: “People are slowly getting used to welcoming AI into their lives.”
Specific chatbots need to be trained, which takes about three months. They start with what we call a “university qualified brain” – we use one provided by Google – and afterwards, we add niche vocabulary to move it into a field of expertise. The bots will never be perfect. We can launch the bot with 80 per cent accuracy but to get to 95 per cent, which is what consumers will put up with, it will take a further four weeks of training. For the mismatches, we hand over to a human, who can review the dilemma, resolve it and train the bot. These issues will always be resolved in the future.
iCumulus is a team of direct response experts. We provide a full suite of services for clients focused on the generation of consumer responses.
