Mediastreet
Tag

chatbot

Browsing
In News

Amazon starts testing ads in its Rufus chatbot

No Comments

By Kyle Wiggers

Rufus, Amazon’s recently launched, shopping-focused chatbot, is getting ads soon.

That’s according to a changelog published by Amazon this week (first spotted by AdWeek), which states that sponsored ads could soon start appearing in placements for Rufus users in the U.S. Ads will be shown based on Amazon search and conversational context, Amazon says, and Rufus may generate text to accompany existing ad copy in certain cases.

Amazon chatbot Rufus
Image Credits:Amazon

“We continue to make enhancements to the Rufus experience, including improving brand and product discovery by introducing relevant sponsored ads that help customers discover selections related to their conversation with Rufus,” a spokesperson said.

The ads in Rufus test recalls Microsoft’s experiments inserting ads into Copilot, the chatbot in Bing and the company’s other properties, including Windows. AI being the costly endeavour that it is, it’s not exactly surprising that companies are looking for tried-and-true methods to generate a return on investment — or at least break even.

Feature Image Credit: Andriy Onufriyenko / Getty Images

By Kyle Wiggers

Sourced from TechCrunch

Read More
By
In News

Anthropic leapfrogs OpenAI with a chatbot that can read a novel in less than a minute

No Comments

By James Vincent

Anthropic has expanded the context window of its chatbot Claude to 75,000 words — a big improvement on current models. Anthropic says it can process a whole novel in less than a minute.

An often overlooked limitation for chatbots is memory. While it’s true that the AI language models that power these systems are trained on terabytes of text, the amount these systems can process when in use — that is, the combination of input text and output, also known as their “context window” — is limited. For ChatGPT it’s around 3,000 words. There are ways to work around this, but it’s still not a huge amount of information to play with.

Now, AI startup Anthropic (founded by former OpenAI engineers) has hugely expanded the context window of its own chatbot Claude, pushing it to around 75,000 words. As the company points out in a blog post, that’s enough to process the entirety of The Great Gatsby in one go. In fact, the company tested the system by doing just this — editing a single sentence in the novel and asking Claude to spot the change. It did so in 22 seconds.

You may have noticed my imprecision in describing the length of these context windows. That’s because AI language models measure information not by number of characters or words, but in tokens; a semantic unit that doesn’t map precisely onto these familiar quantities. It makes sense when you think about it. After all, words can be long or short, and their length does not necessarily correspond to their complexity of meaning. (The longest definitions in the dictionary are often for the shortest words.) The use of “tokens” reflects this truth, and so, to be more precise: Claude’s context window can now process 100,000 tokens, up from 9,000 before. By comparison, OpenAI’s GPT-4 processes around 8,000 tokens (that’s not the standard model available in ChatGPT — you have to pay for access) while a limited-release full-fat model of GPT-4 can handle up to 32,000 tokens.

Right now, Claude’s new capacity is only available to Anthropic’s business partners, who are tapping into the chatbot via the company’s API. The pricing is also unknown, but is certain to be a significant bump. Processing more text means spending more on compute.

But the news shows AI language models’ capacity to process information is increasing, and this will certainly make these systems more useful. As Anthropic notes, it takes a human around five hours to read 75,000 words of text, but with Claude’s expanded context window, it can potentially take on the task of reading, summarizing and analyzing a long documents in a matter of minutes. (Though it doesn’t do anything about chatbots’ persistent tendency to make information up.) A bigger context window also means the system is able to hold longer conversations. One factor in chatbots going off the rails is that when their context window fills up they forget what’s been said and it’s why Bing’s chatbot is limited to 20 turns of conversation. More context equals more conversation.

Feature Image Credit: Anthropic

By James Vincent

A senior reporter who has covered AI, robotics, and more for eight years at The Verge.

Sourced from The Verge

Read More
By
In News

How WhatsApp, JioMart-type chatbots are the new rage in e-commerce

No Comments

By Abhik Sen

Bots that chat with you and help you buy stuff are the new rage in e-commerce

For those of us who love buying fresh vegetables from the neighbourhood store daily, the Covid-19-induced lockdowns were a stressful time. Using WhatsApp as a notepad to make lists of things one needed to buy—which many people were prone to do—one had to first send the list to the grocer on the messaging app and hope that he checked it before the fresh produce was sold out; next, one had to wait for the grocer to get back with the bill and then make the payment via an e-wallet or UPI. Sometimes, one would even have to call the grocer to confirm that the payment was made, and then wait for the delivery to happen. The stress then led to many daily shoppers, like a relative based in Kolkata, to make—horror of horrors—weekly purchases.

After the lockdowns were lifted, the daily shoppers were back at their favourite neighbourhood grocery stores. My relative, a retired corporate executive, too, went back to his old routine, but a service he started using recently is causing some disruption in his habits. The service in question is JioMart on WhatsApp, which helps him order groceries and provisions in an interactive and seamless manner. And the convenience has convinced him to give his daily morning trips to the local grocer a miss.

But grocery is just one way you can use the messaging app. According to Ravi Garg, Director of Business Messaging-India, at Meta, you can also buy tickets for the Bengaluru metro on WhatsApp, and scan the e-ticket to board the train; and even book an Uber cab! These types of transactions on messaging apps are called conversational commerce, a term believed to have been coined by Chris Messina, the inventor of the hashtag, in 2015.

What exactly is conversational commerce? According to experts, conversational commerce is shopping on a messaging platform, where a chatbot engages in a conversation with a customer and helps her to buy a product, which is usually a small-ticket item. According to Prashant Garg, Technology Consulting Partner at EY India, conversational commerce usually involves products like apparel, fashion products, FMCG, fresh foods or other consumer goods. He adds that if a generative AI-powered chatbot starts conversing with customers, a third of them end up buying a product. “The bot has methods and a mechanism built in to engage with customers and keep them engaged till the decision to buy is made,” he says.

According to independent data platform Statista, total spending over conversational commerce channels worldwide will jump to $290 billion in 2025 from $41 billion in 2021. And while the market is still nascent in India, it has huge potential. According to Akhilesh Tuteja, Partner & Head of Technology, Media and Telecommunication at KPMG in India, India is home to the largest consumer base for the biggest conversational commerce enablers. “India is home to more than 600 million smartphones with one of the cheapest internet connections in the world. This infrastructure, along with the reach provided by these platforms and vernacular accessibility through voice commands, sets the right platform for Indian as well as global brands to penetrate the Tier II and Tier III cities. The new generation in these cities is more aspirational, tech-savvy and has increased disposable income,” he says. Although India is a long way from China, it still has 200 million-plus online shoppers, 65 million-plus MSMEs and $100 billion in gross merchandise value (GMV) today—the total addressable market for conversational commerce is huge, he adds. EY’s Prashant Garg agrees. “In two years’ time… we will be nearly a quarter of whatever China is now,” he says.

No wonder that for Meta, conversational commerce, or ‘business messaging’ as the company calls it, is its next big bet. In India, its tie-up with JioMart is significant since WhatsApp had more than 500 million users in India per an IT ministry release in February 2021, while JioMart—part of billionaire Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Industries—has more than two million merchant partners. The tie-up was a “lighthouse example” for the world, Nicola Mendelsohn, Vice President of Global Business Group at Meta, had told BT in an earlier interaction, adding that all types of businesses were already working organically on WhatsApp.

Ravi Garg says that since the roll-out of the service in late August, a lot of businesses have approached Meta and shown interest in building a similar experience. “We built the business platform—WhatsApp—and it can enable any type of business on the platform,” he says. Business messaging can be used across all of Meta’s platforms, and Ravi Garg says that the company is looking at three ways to monetise its messaging platform. First is the WhatsApp Business App, which is free to use for small businesses; now, Meta is planning to add a subscription layer, which will give users access to advanced features. Second, its WhatsApp Business Platform API, which is for medium and large businesses. Here, businesses are charged for conversations they have with customers. The third revenue stream is click-to-messaging ads, wherein, by clicking on an ad on Facebook or Instagram, one lands on a messaging conversation.

 

Meta’s bullishness on business messaging in India is backed by research. According to a Kantar survey commissioned by Meta in April 2022, more than 70 per cent of Indians surveyed said they prefer to message businesses rather than send emails, call or visit their website, while 75 per cent said they are more likely to do business with/purchase from a company that they can contact via messaging. The survey adds that 86 per cent of adults in India message a business at least once a week, considerably higher than the global average of 66 per cent.

Ravi Garg says that business messaging provides customers with a personalised experience, something that shopping online generally lacks. EY’s Prasahant Garg adds that if an AI-powered chatbot is at work, it can provide customers with a personalised experience that even a brick-and-mortar store is unable to, since the bot has to engage with a single customer while a shop assistant has to attend to many. He adds that AI-powered chatbots can be added to existing websites or apps to drive customer engagement. This is done by using turnkey solutions powered by conversational AI that uses data, machine learning, and natural language processing to imitate human interactions, recognise speech and text inputs, and translate their meanings across languages. For instance, software giant IBM has such a solution called IBM Watson Advertising Conversations, which helps facilitate personalised AI conversations with consumers virtually anywhere online.

While the space is set to grow rapidly in India, it is not without its challenges. Tuteja of KPMG in India says that customising and training a conversational AI product in a country with around 22 official languages along with the required accuracy, is possibly the biggest challenge. The next challenge is enabling security and privacy for the users of the conversational AI product in a manner compliant with the local laws, he says, adding that ensuring human bias and examples of unethical behaviour from the training data do not pass into the AI is another big challenge.

Meta’s Ravi Garg says that for WhatsApp, user privacy remains at its core, despite it being open for business. “Messaging is the best way for people and businesses to connect, and India has led that transformation on WhatsApp. The scale, use-cases, and new buying experiences from the region are things we are really excited to see. What’s happening on WhatsApp in India is inspiring our customers all over the world. With business messaging as a top priority for Meta, we’re committed to helping businesses of all sizes in India to build valuable journeys on WhatsApp and keep innovating in this space,” says Matt Idema, VP of Business Messaging at Meta.

As for my Kolkata-based relative, he is happy with the convenience afforded by technology as it offers him more time for other pursuits. Wonder what other chatbots he will start conversing with next.

By Abhik Sen

@abhik_sen

Sourced from btMAG

Read More
By
In News

Top 7 AI-Based Chatbots To Choose For Your Business

No Comments

By

With its promise of limitless possibilities, artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming more pervasive in business circles. Its capabilities to augment human abilities has been demonstrated across functions, and AI-driven chatbots have played a critical role here.

Integrated with a company’s key messaging applications, AI bots are programmed to automate customer support by simulating a conversation with a user. When they interact with these bots, they get the experience of interacting with real people. Not only can such a service be made available to them 24/7, but it can also provide business’ critical data on customer behaviour to inform future decision making.

There are many AI chatbots in the market today, and while some may come with similar features, they are largely different and offer varying levels of capabilities. While some businesses can adapt to basic bots for their use cases, others may need more advanced software to run their operations effectively. With many options to choose from, organisations will do well to understand which will suit their business needs the best.

Here is a list of seven AI chatbots that can help you make this decision. Listed in no particular order, these are likely to improve your overall service, increase engagement, boost sales and enable you to stay competitive in the market.

Botsify

With Botsify, companies can easily develop chatbots without the need for excessive coding and decoding. Combining the support of both AI and human agents, it allows businesses’ to nimbly switch to the latter in case of emergencies. What is more, it can conduct conversations in multiple languages. Additionally, the platform promises a faster response rate, better customer retention, and more qualified leads. Although it charges $50 (onwards), it does provide a two-week trial period for businesses.

Click here for more.

Mobile Monkey

Emerging as one of the more popular platforms to build AI chatbots for Facebook Messenger and SMS, Mobile Monkey offers businesses an interactive interface to interact with their customers more effectively. Free to use, it has become a regular fixture in many company’s social media marketing strategies. It enables them to automate responses, maintain a long contact list, send periodic notifications, and more.

Click here for more.

ChatterOn

This platform enables businesses to build a bot in under five minutes! What is more, they are given the option of choosing between 20 pre-developed bots, or even customise it without any coding requirements. While its key features remain its ability to support a wide range of content — from images to gifs to videos — other reasons to make this your choice of chatbot is its capability to allow users to meet their end-to-end solutions. Although it is free to use (for a limited period), businesses will have to pay $0.0010 per message after that.

Click here for more.

Pandorabots

Although Pandorabots provides a range of services to meet various businesses demands, it requires some coding skills to get started. Businesses can use this for customer service, voice interfaces, B2B messaging, among others. The platform claims to have over 2,75,000 registered developers, with almost 3,25,000 chatbots already developed. Although there is a free version available for a limited range of features, a more comprehensive package starts at $19 per month including a two-week free trial.

Click here for more.

Hubspot

HubSpot offers a full stack of software for content, sales and marketing services, as well as free CRM to organise better and build better relationships. Its primary feature is its content marketing flow that enables businesses to effectively respond to a large client base. Although some features are available for free, proper packages start at $35 a month.

Click here for more.

Rulai

Driven by NLU and deep learning, Rulai enables businesses to track non-linear conversations and engage with customers effectively using virtual assistants. Its multitasking capabilities allow users to understand the context of the conversation and take actions accordingly. Targeted at companies across various industries, Rulai claims to deliver over 80% satisfaction for customers.

Click here for more.

Watson Assistant

This allows businesses to build advanced conversational interfaces into any device, website, apps or cloud. Developed by IBM, it does not require users to have any prior coding experience. Watson Assistant is pre-trained with content from specific industries and allows businesses to build and deploy conversational interactions. Although the Lite versions with limited features come for free, packages start from $120 for 1,000 users per month along with a free 30-day trial.
Click here for more.

By

Sourced from https://analyticsindiamag.com

Read More
By
In News

5 Social Media Marketing Trends to Watch Out For in 2018

No Comments

Make sure to keep an eye out for these five social media marketing trends that are taking over the digital marketing world in the upcoming year.

Did you know that on an average, we scroll through at least 300 feet (90 meters) of content daily? Not every brand’s campaign grabs our attention. It is a difficult and competitive game, as brands are trying harder to grab our attention, while our attention span has been reduced to a mere eight seconds. Brand strategy in the coming years will try more than ever to connect with their audiences across a variety of social platforms. It becomes imperative that your campaign works, more so taking into account the speed of feed. We have curated a list of five trends that we believe will impact your social media strategy in 2018.

Adopt Chatbots

https://giphy.com/gifs/11FyVJOvLleR5S

Gone are the days when chatbots meant unresponsive, hilarious and outright ridiculous software. Today, chatbots can do a lot more than just solve customer issues or order pizza for you. Various studies state that 20% of business content could be machine generated by next year. When we teach machines how to create authentic and engaging stories, the potential for advertising and marketing will become multifold. Chatbots interact with the users and deliver the solutions that they are looking for at the speed of light. Bots are developing to become smarter and empathetic. This engagement feels personal, from the user’s perspective. Chatbots are definitely a must-try social media marketing strategy in 2018 for your business.

Momentary content makes for good engagement:

Streaks GIF - Find & Share on GIPHY

Snapchat was the early adopter of momentary content. Instagram and Facebook followed suit, owing to the huge popularity of Stories format in a short time. These content are ephemeral and disappear in 24 hours. Brands are creating a whole new digital marketing strategy for their momentary content marketing. Having your stories appear at the very top of your follower’s feed keeps your brand at the top of their mind. Many brands do a live story session with a subject matter expert. This helps the user look out for the brand more so as to not miss an informative session. Ephemeral content marketing strategy is something that you should try in 2018!

Augmented reality boom

Augmented Reality Technology GIF by Wikitude - Find & Share on GIPHY

Augmented reality blurs the line between reality and computer-generated content by enhancing what we see, and hear. The adoption of augmented reality on mobile phones is a quick and easy way for brands to reach their target audience. Many brands are taking their products right inside the homes of users through exclusive filters. IKEA has released an app called Place which allows users to preview how the furniture would look in their homes before they buy. As more people get warmed up to augmented reality, more people will start to feel like they are missing out on things and want to become a part of it. However, you would also have to check where your strategy fits. Make sure your AR adds value for the user and don’t simply create one for the sake of it.

Influencers are here to stay

Social Media Instagram GIF by Much - Find & Share on GIPHY

Influencer marketing has grown so much over the last two years that the popularity has made it difficult to know whom to trust. Consumers expect genuine reviews from genuine influencers. Brands must seek to work with relevant influencers with industry background or knowledge. Viewers are already bored of seeing brands engage popular influencers who promote teeth whitening and a mobile phone app with the same vigor. In 2018, try and create worthwhile relationships with influencers and maintain them. Influencer marketing is going to become more authentic with brands moving to real experts instead of social influencers.

Make more videos

Film Scene GIF by Alexander IRL - Find & Share on GIPHY

We are addicted to mobile phones, and we love our videos. In 2017, 90% of the most shared content on social media was in video format. If you are not using videos yet, you will have to quickly start using them and master the art of capturing the user’s attention in the first 3 seconds. Video is the quickest and the closest way you will come face to face with your target audience. As with everything, you need to have a clear strategy before creating a video. Taking advantage of Facebook Live and Instagram Live is also a smart strategy. Ensure that the video is of the highest quality and engaging. You will also have to consider making the best design and make sure to add subtitles to attract users when they are watching with sound off.

Have you listed your company in our Media Directory? It’s free! Everyone’s favourite price! Click here to do it now.

 

Read More
By
In News

Now Available…The First Mobile Marketing Chatbot That Knows Your Return On Ad Spend

No Comments

Tunebot provides mobile marketers with an automated tool for interacting with their advertising spend data.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Marketing company TUNE has announced the release of tunebot, the first chatbot built specifically for the mobile marketing industry. Tunebot, available within the team messaging service Slack, is designed to enable TUNE customers to quickly and easily interact with marketing and advertising data such as quickly looking up reports or calculating return on ad spend.

For example: Tunebot: Show me app installs in May, by day:

By logging into the Multiverse product, TUNE customers can setup tunebot and then ask it to return specific results, graphs and charts that highlight key metrics like the cost per click on Google Adwords, the number of app installs by day, or over time, revenue per impression, as well as return on ad spend. Enabling tunebot is as simple as authorising TUNE for your Slack team and then logging into Multiverse directly within Slack. More information about how to enable tunebot can be found here.

Says Jennifer Crook, Marketing Manager, Revl, “We integrated tunebot with Slack to give us quick updates on our daily performance without the need to check the platform manually. I can check volumes and CPI by channel or platform just by typing to tunebot in Slack, which saves us time and allows us to make optimisations faster.”

Says Peter Hamilton, CEO of TUNE, “We believe all marketing should be measured and judged on performance. To be most effective, marketers also need access to measurement and performance in different forms, depending on what they need to know. The first of its kind, tunebot adds a new layer of quick access to KPIs or partner performance by simply asking a question. I’m really excited to see how marketers use tunebot. It will continue to evolve quickly the more requests it receives, so please start using it and sending your feedback!”

For marketers, understanding the link between return on advertising spend (ROAS) and bottom-line results are vital to dialling up a winning mobile marketing strategy.

The people at TUNE say that their bot can integrate ad spend data from more than 150 ad partners together with attribution data in one unified system. Included within the TUNE Marketing Console, Multiverse is a marketer’s system of choice for tracking and reconciling ad spend, installs revenue and ROAS.

 

 

Read More
By
In News

Evangelisation? Now There’s a Chatbot for That

No Comments

Yes, in 2017 a Catholic publisher has created the world’s first evangelising chatbot. Ew.

By Nicole Buckler

Are you having trouble converting people around you to your religion? Well, as religion dies out, people who still have faith have an uphill battle to get people to believe in burning bushes and arks that held way too many animals. But now you can have a chatbot to do your work for you!

Permission to speak freely? Thanks. Wandering around trying to convert people to your religion in 2017 is seen as annoying and suspicious. So it’s a natural evolution that some religious people think evangelisation might be a good job for the robots. You can’t hurt their little feelings after all.

Aleteia, the Catholic website that launched the PopeEmoji during Pope Francis’ 2015 visit to the United States, has launched an evangelising chatbot.

“All Christians are called to share our faith, but it’s not easy for most,” said Jesus Colina, Global Editor at Aleteia.org. (Yes his name is Jesus! Well, it’s probably pronounced the Latino way but still, the point is valid.) “Unless you are able to offer something that you know will be welcome, evangelisation can quickly become uncomfortable and leave people feeling intruded upon, instead of inspired.”

Aleteia’s solution to this challenge of getting people to join their cult organisation is an intelligence software agent that recommends articles and stories based on need. Accessing Aleteia.org’s 5-years-deep archive of content, the chatbot — nicknamed ePaul after the evangelising apostle — asks a few questions about the person and situation one is trying to address, and then suggests articles that it thinks will be relevant and helpful.

At this stage ePaul is like a typical pious person. The conversation isn’t two-way, it gives users the opportunity to respond to multiple-choice questions about who you are trying to pull into your religion. Then you are supplied with articles that back up your position tailored to their demographic. It’s not a conversation. At all. Seriously, the TrumpBot is way better and even the Domino’s pizza chatbot puts ePaul in the shade.

But cults all over the world can now take comfort in knowing that they don’t  have to send door-knockers into the street anymore. They can send ePaul, eBuddha, eEber, eKrishna, ePastafarian or eAtheist.

“He’s lively,” says Jesus. (He’s actually not). “But he has a serious job: to help people find a way to say ‘I am aware, I care, and so does God.'” Nooo, his job is to help annoying evangelising pious people to throw articles at your to try to disprove your position of not wanting to join their sect.

“As far as we know, ePaul is the world’s first evangelising chatbot,” said Jason Deal, Aleteia’s EVP of Strategy and Marketing. “We hope it is a fun and easy way to share stories of hope, trust, love and faith with loved ones, friends, and acquaintances.”

Listen, this chatbot is creepy. But chatbots for business? I am a huge fan. Any chatbot that can help me order pizza from Facebookistan without actually having to interact with a human is inspired. Religion looks quite beige in comparison.

 

 

Read More
By