David Curran, Machine Learning Engineer at OpenJaw Technologies David will provide a down-to-earth review of the current status of chatbots based on his extensive experience. No hype, just facts. He will then focus on a number of chatbots case studies given his extensive deployment experience. Explaining the impact of the local culture and language on chatbots. And highlighting some of the unique aspects of chatbots in for example in China compared to the rest of the world that will accelerate the Chinese chatbot industry faster than anywhere else. Could Asia become the chatbot center of the world?

1. Creating a Chatbot Strategy, for China and Beyond

2. About Me
• Built Chinese language chatbot system for TravelSky GDS (China’s largest PSS)
• Former Technical lead with IBM Watson Cognitive Engineering Team
• Have build chatbots in Chinese, English, French and Spanish
• Worked for Amdocs predicting churn, fraud, spend etc
• Alan knows me from visualizations on reddit

3. 6Offices across the globe
453 Staff
30 Customers
Dublin – Group HQ
Dalian – China HQ
Hong Kong – Asia Pacific HQ
Krakow – Delivery Centre
Madrid — Delivery Centre
Galway — Delivery Centre
OpenJaw Key facts
34B PB (IBE). 8th largest globally,
5th in Asia*
*T2RL IBE Report, April 2019

4. Chatbots in Travel
How to Create your Chatbot Strategy

5. Here is what we are talking about….
1. Why now?
2. The Promise of Chatbots
3. Definitions
4. What they CAN’T do
5. The 5 Steps to Create Your Chatbot strategy
#1 Who? #2 When? #3 What?

6. Why Chatbots?

7. Now we want to
communicate via our
preferred channel
We used to ring a call centre...

8. 1B monthly
active users
1.6B monthly
active users
321 M monthly
active users
1.5B monthly
active users
455M monthly
active users
1.3B monthly
active users
2.23B monthly
active users
800M monthly
active users

9. “There’s a new
user interface
paradigm emerging,
and it’s based around
messaging.”

10. What does a chatbot look like?

12. What do Chatbots promise for travel brands?

13. Meet your customers
where they are…

14. #1 Customer Centricity
• Get closer to customers by being where they are…
• Interact in what is increasingly a preferred mode (chat).
• Better, faster experience:
• No waiting for an operator to
• No navigating through menus
• Problems resolved quickly.

15. #2 Cost
• A small set of queries occupy the majority of call
centre time.
• Chatbot can handle basic queries about billing,
payments or deliveries,
• Call centre operators can be freed up to handle the
more complex queries adding greater value to the
business overall.

16. #3 Revenue
• Quicker service
• Targeted upsell
• Contextual cross-sell

17. How to create your Chatbot Strategy

18. Positioning, Personas and Personality
Think through the experience that the User will have: a combination of…
User Interface Tone Personality Positioning

19. • Who are your target end users?
• What do you want them to do?
• What is the nature of your relationship with them?
• What is the Chatbots job description?
• What problems do you want this Chatbot to solve?
Positioning, Personas and Personality

20. You must create personality.
Just like a brand. Your Brand.
Give your Chatbot a job description.
Give your Chatbot a name, age and gender.
Write down examples of how the Chatbot would talk
Make it express your brand.
Not having a personality is a personality. A poor one!

21. Questions and Intents
‘Intents’
Intent is something your customers want to do.

22. Challenge: different ways to ask the same
thing:
• ‘I need to check my airmiles points’
• ‘How do I check how many points I already
have?’
• ‘Where do I check to see my RR points?
• ‘I want to check my airmiles and use some
soon!!’
• ‘I gotta find my airmiles’

23. Pareto Principle
• 80% of the questions your customers ask are
covered by 20% of the knowledge
• The most popular ‘intents’ should be handled
by your Chatbot

24. Source of questions?
• Do not manufacture questions.
• Do not take questions from internet forums, google search terms, mturk, experts…
Example: Experts versus ‘normal’ people
• Expert Hears ‘Add SSR for PAX to return sector’
• Customer said ‘I hurt my leg skiing can I get help with that?’
• Get real questions from real users using the same device and UI that they use

25. 1. Marketing: Tone, Positioning, Personas, Personality
2. Business Lead/Product Owner: Leads & validates planned improvements.
3. Customer Support: Business Analyst who knows the correct answers
4. Cognitive Engineer: Your expert in AI, ML, and NLP who advises, sets up the
Chatbot, runs and interpret tests, implements improvements
5. Content Writers who create the answers to match your brand and improve
understanding
Checklist #1 : Who is needed?

26. Checklist #2 When - Timescales?
• Decide Personality
• Gather Questions
• Classify Questions – Accuracy + Confidence
• Write Answers
• Run customer tests. Rinse and repeat - Gather, Classify, Tweak

27. • Iterative Quality improvements phase
• Accuracy, confidence, user tests, Log analysis
• Confidence - how sure the system is of its answer.
• Quality Metric: Are user getting the answer they needed in a satisfying way?
• Rates of abandonment
• Timings to improve performance in chatflows
• For example: ‘Do people disappear when you ask their passport number?’
Checklist # 3 What Metrics?

28. What about China?

29. • 20 million users a month
• In the West: scrape to get 2000 questions
• In China 10,000 conversations handed over
Scale of China

30. WeChat

31. • Golden Shield (Great Firewall)
• Biggest players are often local
• Western players that are in China don’t
have all features available
• GDPR isn’t a big concern, sensitive topics are
• We created Lilypad, our own version of Watson
Chinese Technical Setup

32. • We check in with boss once a week once a role is defined.
Unless there are problems
• Supervisors role is different (check in vs. always on)
• More willing to pushback
• Privacy is standard here
• Worldview (Plato versus Confucius)
• Lift etiquette.
• You don’t notice the water you swim in.
Cultural Differences

33. david.curran@openjawtech.com
visit us at www.openjawtech.com