Re:Chatbots have struggled to live up to the hype
by omarchowdhury on Monday April 03, 2017 @05:29AM
(#14021570)
What are those Chinese market factors?
Re:Chatbots have struggled to live up to the hype
by BukhariH on Monday April 03, 2017 @10:36AM
(#14023033)
Another factor in China is that people all ready use WeChat to make payments to each other (http://uk.businessinsider.com/wechats-p2p-usage-is-massive-2...).
Hence, it was a natural progression to allow payments to businesses which is where chatbots came in.
Re:Chatbots have struggled to live up to the hype
by puranjay on Monday April 03, 2017 @06:23AM
(#14021759)
I reckon easier typing would be one of them. From what I've read, predictive text is much better in Chinese, as is voice recognition
Re:Chatbots have struggled to live up to the hype
by RugnirViking on Tuesday April 04, 2017 @10:00AM
(#14032636)
> solve a very specific and usually uncommon need.
Perhaps i'm a strange case, but the only times I or anyone I know have ever had to use support are for these cases.
If an issue is common, its not an issue for support, its a failure of ux or design
Chatbots in China over WeChat act as a lightweight Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system, which is highly successful due to a set of market factors which are (at least from my perspective) unique to China.
But, as I've been saying for about a year now, chatbots, in their current incarnation, don't make a lot of sense outside that niche.
Looking at it from either the American or Japanese perspective, there are a set of expected standards for customer support, which are either already met via web-based mostly-automated systems (Amazon is really good here), or by being able to directly chat with a human being (perhaps supplemented by AI) to solve a very specific and usually uncommon need.
Replacing that setup with nothing but a text-based IVR system is a non-starter for any company that wants to remain in business.