I worked on a chat bot to help solve technical issues. It would parse what the user wanted and then search the already established articles we had that were ingested into Elasticsearch.

At first, we started with a goal of fully conversational AI. So, for example, it would ask a question based on the article and give you a choice, you could then type your choice. This became a nightmare for the model so we added buttons instead.

Then, before we knew it, this “bot” was just a glorified search engine that feigned being a bot. Towards the end of it I scratched my head and said “did we even replace the current knowledgebase? are we spending thousands on something that adds no value?”

I don’t think chatbots are it either. I think we could have just replaced the KB search with Elasticsearch and been done with it, no need for any ML.