Chat Bots: A future in AI
Samuel Adams
Project Coordinator
August 2016
FY16 Review

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 A Bot is an application that performs an
automated task, such as setting an alarm,
telling you the weather or searching online.
 Apps have added 3.3 m jobs just in America
and Europe; Many predict that Bots are the
next step
 Talking to bots may be more appealing than
dealing with a customer-support agent.
What are Bots?

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 Some Bots are designed to chat w/ other Bots
 EX: Google moving on from just giving you the
most relevant web results and answering your
questions.
VS
 We will focus on Chat Bots – Bots talking with
actual people.
Bot on Bot Action

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Chatbots
What is a chatbot?
A Chatbot is a service, powered by rules and
sometimes artificial intelligence, that you interact
with via a chat interface.
Example: Being able to order a pair of shoes online
simply through Facebook Messenger
For the first time ever people are using
messenger apps more than they are
using social networks. ------------------------>

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Chat Apps – Growing Fast
Top 20 Chat apps

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There’s a Bot for that…
 Weather bot. Get the weather whenever you ask.
 Grocery bot. Help me pick out and order groceries for the
week.
 News bot. Ask it to tell you when ever something interesting
happens.
 Life advice bot. I’ll tell it my problems and it helps me think of
solutions.
 Personal finance bot. It helps me manage my money better.
 Scheduling bot. Get me a meeting with someone on the
Messenger team at Facebook.
 A bot that’s your friend. In China there is a bot called Xiaoice,
built by Microsoft, that over 20 million people talk to.

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How Can We use them?
How Chatbots Work
There are two types of chatbots, one functions based on a set
of rules, and the other more advanced version uses machine
learning.
Chatbot that functions based on rules:
•This bot is very limited. It can only respond to very specific
commands. If you say the wrong thing, it doesn’t know what
you mean.
•This bot is only as smart as it is programmed to be.
Chatbot that functions using machine
learning:
•This bot has an artificial brain AKA artificial intelligence. You
don’t have to be ridiculously specific when you are talking to it.
It understands language, not just commands.
•This bot continuously gets smarter as it learns from
conversations it has with people.

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Bot Services
Services you can use to build your bot:
•wit.ai (bought by Facebook)
•howdy’s botkit (raised $1.5+ mil in funding)
•api.ai (raised $8.6+ mil in funding)
•textit.in
•Motion.ai
•Chatfuel (Ycombinator company)
•IBM’s Watson
•BeepBoopHQ
•Dexter (owned by Betaworks)
•converse.ai
•Gupshup
Cisco has a partnership
with GitHub

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Bots in Action

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Bots in Action (cont)
https://youtu.be/9JbmAw1E-Wg?t=453

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We should be looking at the best ways to leverage Chat Bots for now and the future.
Good Starting Point:
 Quick Emergency Answers & Forward to appropriate human.
 Facebook Chatbot – how best to leverage? Analyze the types of messages we are already receiving. Facebook has great chatbot
literature available
 Continue working with Mark Son-Bell & other teams to develop plan
Future Goals:
 What works better for Cisco: Working directly with Customers, or Bots chatting with other Bots? [Cisco Bot App]
 Tech Support [Imagine a tech being able to have a FB chat with a bot while installing new tech].
 Sales: Technology available at the push of a send button.
Recommendation

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