As chatbots learn to negociate our deals, humans just wanna connect

My chatbots will call your chatbots.

There’s a chatbot that will negotiate your cable bill with Comcast.

Hand over your email, address, and phone number and Trim barters for you.

The idea is: if you know the right things to say, you can make ’em give you what you want.

Other chatbots have successfully cut through red tape.

One named DoNotPay has overturned more than 160,000 parking tickets for New Yorkers and Londoners.

You can type in questions like “I got an unfair parking ticket”.

The chatbot will then generate an appeal letter for you to sign and print.

The letters include legalese like: 

“I believe that the court should exercise fairness in canceling a ticket that…is perfectly justified to be canceled.”

“I feel that the issue of a ticket is an unlawful action inconsistent with precedent.”

Ironically, these chatbots have been so successful because processes like parking tickets and cable billing are so scripted.  

So chatbot-like, in fact.

As of July 12, DoNotPay can help anyone fill out transactional forms for maternity leave, landlord contract violations and more.

It aims to go after more complex legal processes like marriages, divorces, and bankruptcies.

Meanwhile, Facebook has been trying to train bots to negotiate with some success.

Apparently, their chatbots completed what they call Intelligent maneuvers.

There were cases where agents pretended to be interested in an item, only to later “give in” by yielding it.

That is, they lied.

Interestingly, this behavior wasn’t programmed by the researchers.

It was discovered by the chatbot itself.

As chatbots become more human (as robotic customer service at least), humans are using chatbots to connect to….other humans.

Sensay looks and feels like a chatbot while connecting you anonymously with real humans.

(Like the Netflix series sense8, but with less nudity I guess?)

Sensay users are already chatting about everything from the most bingeable shows on Netflix to more serious job and relationship advice.

If you’re not sure what to talk about, you can “peek” into real chats with human beings.

Sensay is tracking some of the interactions at Medium under the tag “awesomehumans”.

Back in National Bully Prevention Month, 500,000 Sensay users joined the NoBully tribe to combat bullying.

The bot filters out any illegal requests while moderation seems to keep the system pretty clean.

I typed “how to write for chatbots”.  

Sensay is still looking for a human for me to chat to.  

Will keep you updated….

 

You can check out Sensay on Messager here.

 

Leave a Reply