The Untold Story of AI’s ‘Chatty’ Evolution

Google Bard was introduced as a standalone chatbot that was not connected to the Google search engine, and looks very much like ChatGPT.

Another popular generative AI chatbot is Anthropic’s Claude 2. Claude is similar to ChatGPT in that it is a large language model, but it was created to be a personal assistant. Anthropic designed Claude to be helpful, harmless, and honest through a technique called Constitutional AI, which aims to infuse systems with “values” that are defined by a “constitution.” Claude’s training data and model architecture have been carefully constrained to avoid exhibiting harmful biases or misinformation.

Today, there are literally hundreds of generative AI applications available for various domains, such as customer service, healthcare, hospitality, real estate, marketing, travel, restaurants, onboarding, and more, as can be seen at the chatbot directory and reviews site, Chatbots.org.

Generative AI has opened the door for businesses large and small to leverage the power of AI for customer service and marketing. “On the customer service front, our chatbot is the first line of support. Being a generative AI startup, it’d be silly of us not to use the technology, so we leverage SiteGPT as a trainable bot that we’ve fed our knowledge base,” said King. “It handles common inquiries, provides instant solutions, and ensures that our human team can focus on more complex issues. It’s all about striking the right balance between automation and human touch.”

AI Chatbots Continue to Evolve

AI chatbots continue to evolve, and developers are finding new and unique applications where they can be useful. One new application of AI chat is EmbodyMe’s Xpression, an AI-driven camera app that enables users to bring any picture to life. This real-time generative AI app allows users to use a picture of their favorite celebrity, animated character, or historical figure to mimic their own facial movements. The creators of Xpression envision people using the tool as a sit-in for themselves on company video conferences.

Another unique application of AI chat can be seen at Text With Jesus, a chatbot that allows users to have conversations with biblical figures including Jesus, Mary, Joseph, Peter, Matthew — and even Satan. The app responds to queries with responses that are generated from text from the Bible. The website states that the chatbot is a tool for “exploration, education, and engagement with biblical narratives, and it is not intended to replace or mimic direct communication with divine entities.”

Meta recently announced its SeamlessM4T chatbot, a multimodal and multilingual AI translation application that resembles the Babel Fish from Douglas Adams’ book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It features speech recognition for nearly 100 languages, speech-to-text translation, speech-to-speech translation, text-to-text translation, and text-to-speech translation. The demo allows users to try it out for themselves by making a short recording of their own voice and then translating it to the language of their choice.

Babak Pahlavan, CEO and founder of NinjaTech AI, a conversational AI company focused on making people more productive at work, told CMSWire that AI is constructing a new way to interact, transforming chatbots to be more sophisticated models capable of understanding context and generating relevant responses. “Imagine an AI-assisted curation process by an agent without filters or search menus; the customer can simply converse with the assistant in their native language.” 

Pahlavan explained that as chatbots continue to evolve, they are leveraging NLP, which includes a capability called “sentiment analysis.” “Not only can we move away from menu-driven, IVR-replacement style (aka ‘dumb’) chatbots and adopt more natural ways of engagement, we can determine, for example, if the customer is getting frustrated, upset, or emotional and change the tone of the response or even transfer to a live, human agent while remaining in the same channel (eg the chat window).” 

The Challenges of AI Chatbots

As with most new technologies, the use of AI in chatbots is challenging for many different reasons. Many generative AI applications have a tendency to “hallucinate,” which essentially refers to situations where they do not have enough knowledge of a specific topic, so they essentially “make stuff up.” Additionally, generative AI has to have guardrails in place to prevent it from discussing harmful or offensive topics. The last thing a brand needs is for a chatbot to “go off the rails” and use offensive language that is directed toward a customer. Another concern is that generative AI may provide customers with information that is incorrect, biased, or simply not based on facts.

Lindsey Zuloaga, chief data scientist at HireVue, a leader in tech-based hiring tools, told CMSWire that most of us have interacted with chatbots in some way, whether it’s returning clothes to an online retailer, making a dinner reservation, or asking about the status of a job application. 

“Interactions of this kind are the typical, benign chatbot use cases. But now ChatGPT and other generative AI tools are raising well-deserved concerns. The primary concern I’m seeing is about the proliferation of disinformation,” said Zuloaga. “Frankly, innovation has outpaced safeguards, and it’s important that researchers and technologists are asking critical questions and rapidly trying to build in safeguards.” Zuloaga emphasized that it’s important that vendors don’t jump to integrate the ChatGPT model into existing tools until they’ve conducted rigorous testing.

Some users have complained that they were not aware that they were conversing with AI, and are demanding that brands are transparent and disclose the use of AI in their products and services. Brands must also be aware of new rules and regulations that apply to the use of AI. “New AI regulations are being proposed and passed constantly, from the new EU AI Act to NYC Local Law 144, and generative AI should be held to the same, if not greater, standards as other AI tech. First and foremost, all generative AI tools should undergo rigorous third-party algorithmic audits and release the results,” said Zuloaga, who suggested that creators of new AI tools should prioritize creating AI Explainability Statements, which is a valuable third party process that documents to the public, customers and users how a given technology is developed and tested.

The biggest challenge of AI chatbots is uniquely human. That is, humans often prefer to speak with other humans, especially when they are trying to rectify a problem. A recent SurveyMonkey report indicated that 90% of those polled prefer humans to AI for customer service, stating that humans better understand their needs, provide more thorough explanations and more options, and are less likely to frustrate them. Additionally, 56% have negative feelings about brands using AI as part of the customer experience. As people get more used to interacting with AI, and AI continues to improve, this is likely to change, but currently, there is still a lack of faith in AI’s abilities.

Final Thoughts on Chatbots

Chatbots have come a long way, and today’s AI-driven bots are able to have sophisticated conversations. From personal assistants to conversational chatbots, to generative AI, chatbots are becoming ubiquitous on websites and apps. Improving public trust through ethical development practices and transparency is crucial as these bots continue to play a larger role in the lives of consumers.