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Comment by olavgg | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer, I work for a chatbot startup that is doing really well in the Nordics. In two years we have grown from 3 employees to almost 100. Chatbots are a real big thing, our business is stronger than ever, end-users and our customers are engaged in this! We solve real business problems, we integrate the chatbot with existing business systems. With this is mind, chatbots are not perfect, but most end-users are forgiving and accept this.

Chatbots are not a fad, its a real thing, and you will only see more of them in the coming years.

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Out of genuine curiosity, what real business problems do chatbots solve? The only ones I encounter are "customer support" bots, but I'm wondering if there are other uses that businesses and customers find value in.

that's probably the industry where the original poster works in. If 80% of interactions are mundane and repetitive and can be done by a bot businesses will go for it to cut down on costs. The other 20% can be dealt with by a human if need be. I don't think 100% is/was the goal at all.

I worked at an ISP years ago and they had a chatbot which prevented a lot of support calls, therefore saved a lot of money.

And there was no AI, ML or anything, just basic database fulltext searches and tree-based questions and answers.

Good question! Some things a chatbot excels at:

Finding information quickly: no menus, no clicking around, no more searching.

Customer facing chatbots are one alternative, but many of our clients also have internal chatbots for either HR stuff, or for finding internal information. One good example we see is onboarding new employees who benefit from a chatbot as they ask a lot of questions. Also they are not afraid of asking too many questions as they no longer fear that they are nagging nor asking "dumb questions".

Automating processes: for example filling out the insurance form. Or filling out tax returns. Placing an order, getting status of an order. There are also a lot of HR tasks that gets automated. How many days of vacation there is left, business travel, arranging meetings, company benefits and so on.

Think about it this way, a chatbot is a very advanced full text search engine that excels at filtering out most of the noise. That is also why they have another name, virtual assistants.

So, I'm pretty sure they are a fad, and we're just about reaching 'peak hype'. Any time I use them, it seems like an interaction that would have taken 2 minutes by filling a form takes 20 minutes instead.

I hoped you might prove me wrong, so I checked out boost.ai - is there any way to get a demo of your chatbots without booking a sales call?

That's some mad growth you've had, so you must be doing something right! Also interested to know how you went about finding your first customers? Are they mainly in Norway?

Sorry I'm not updated about what demos we have available. But please book a sales call, they are nice people and they will be very happy to tell you more about it.

All we did in beginning was asking our first client what they want, they replied chatbot and something better than ----> that. We promised, read a lot about NLP and delivered. After that we partnered with several consulting companies, which made the selling and project integration process a lot easier. Most of our clients are in Norway, but we have clients in several other countries too. Even Finland which is not an indo european language but uralic.

What a horrifying vision of the future. I want to see fewer chatbots, not more. Just give me a website that actually works instead of wasting my time chatting.

How does your chatbot startup address the issues with chatbots that have been raised in the article and in these comments? And how is it better than other GUIs?

Perhaps you could describe an example / use case of a chat bot that works well?

> end-users ... are engaged in this!

Bullshit.

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