So most of us have at this point in our lives have probably used a chatbot, maybe without
even knowing it. Have you ever wondered how does a chatbot work? What powers it? How do I interact
with it? Let's dive in. My name is Morgan Carroll with IBM Cloud. Let's say you're the owner of a
flower shop, this is you. And you're the only employee, maybe you don't have time to respond
to common customer inquiries, such as what time do you open, do you have yellow roses in stock,
how do I contact you. So you've got your customer up here and they need to get in touch with you,
but you're busy you can't answer the phone. So what can we do to solve this problem? This is
where Flora, the floral chatbot comes in. This is Flora over here. Now if a customer has a simple
question, let's say they just want to know, um, what time do you guys open. They can ask Flora
"hey what time do you all open?", and then Flora is going to be able to respond
with the appropriate answer. She's going to say, you know, maybe "we open Monday at 9 AM." All
without me having to interact with the chatbot, or the customer, so that I'm free to do what I love
to do which is designing floral arrangements. Now let's think of a more complex example.
Say you have the bank here, and you as the customer you would like to check and see
what your balance is. So I just got paid I don't know how much money is in the bank but I need
to go buy some socks. So rather than having to call the bank and wait on hold, and wait for a
teller to pull up your information, and check your account status, you could actually interact with
Birdie, the banking bot. So in this case I'm going to ask Birdie, "Birdie,
what is my balance? How much money do I have currently?" Bertie's going to come back and ask,
"I can help you with that, but what is your account number, your pin number?", you know
some identifying information. So I'm going to be able to provide this information back to Birdie.
My account number, maybe my date of birth, a pin number, etc., etc. From there
all without any tellers or any employees having to interact with Birdie, she's going to be able
to go and ask the bank, she's going to pass along all this information, my account number,
my date of birth, and my pin number, and she's going to say "hey bank, how much money does this
person have in their account?" The bank is going to authorize me and say "okay this is all the
appropriate information that we need." The bank is going to respond with "I'm sorry you only have
five dollars", maybe enough for socks, maybe not. But then Birdie is going to be able to take that
response and pass it back to me, the customer, all without having to interact with any humans
and it's very simple. So how does this really work? Let's dive in. Going back to the floral shop
example. Let's say tomorrow is Mother's Day and you forgot to order flowers like we normally do.
So here's you, my customer. Now like we mentioned before, the floral shop owner is very busy,
she's putting together all these arrangements, she doesn't really have time to answer the phone.
So luckily there are a few different ways that you the user can interact
with our chatbot to actually automate ordering some flowers for your mother.
So, on the floral shop website there could be a little pop-up, maybe at the bottom that has Flora.
This is Flora, the floral bot, and she's here and she's going to be able to pop-up and ask
me "what kind of flowers would you like to order?" Obviously yellow roses because those
are my mother's favorite. If we don't want to use the website, we could actually just call in.
So it can be either text based or voice based. So, if I call the chatbot she says "Welcome to
Flower Supply 101, what would you like to place your order for?" I would say "I would like a dozen
yellow roses", and it's just conversational. And she's going to take my order and be able
to process it and you can also use various instant messaging services, you know, for different social
media platforms you can integrate. So you have all these different ways that you can interact
with the chatbot. Now let's think about how that actually works, sort of on the backend.
So I think by now we're all familiar with the cloud, it's the buzzword of the year. This is
actually where our chatbot is going to live. So you'll have a chatbot service provider and this
chatbot is going to integrate with various services to actually process whatever speech
it is that the user is saying. It's going to use Natural Language Processing, as well as Artificial
Intelligence, to take what i'm saying and then actually translate it into something that a
computer can understand. So, I'm saying whether it's via phone or via instant messenger, or to
the webpage via text or voice, I would like to purchase some yellow roses. So I'll say "purchase
yellow roses", and maybe I want to do a dozen. Maybe next year I'll do two dozen, I should.
So then it's gonna pass this, I'm gonna pass this information to either the web page or IM or voice.
This is actually, whatever this medium is, it's going to send this information
up to the cloud. Now the cloud is going to take this and it's going to process it. It's going to
say "I see that the user wants to purchase this specific item", in this case 12 yellow roses.
Now we have to make sure that we actually have these roses in stock, you know, if i try to place
an order and then I pay for it and then I get a notice sorry we're out of stock well that's just
not a good user experience. So the way this is going to work is we'll use various cloud services
and we're actually going to go over here and connect to what I'm going to call floral systems.
And this is basically just going to be our database on the backend,
and it's going to show, you know, maybe I have 36 yellow roses in stock. I've also got,
let's say, 14 red tulips, and 3 succulents.
Succulents. So, I've sent this information to the webpage already as the user now the webpage
is going to say "all right, purchase", and then 12 roses, yellow roses. Now this is going to
send this information to the cloud to my chatbot service provider, and then that is actually going
to go out here and check the database. So I'll say "12 yellow roses is what we're looking for",
and then we can see we've actually got 36. So we have plenty of roses, this is good.
So now we're going to send a response back. We're going to say
"Yes, we have more than enough roses in stock. So we can go ahead and place this order".
And the cloud is going to come back and say "Yes let's place this order." And then the webpage is
going to come back to me and say "Absolutely, you're in luck. You didn't wait too long. Maybe
next year try to do it a little quicker, but we're going to be able to fulfill your
order." So then I'm over here the whole time as, let's say I'm over here, the floral shop owner.
And I'm just building floral arrangements. Maybe I'll get a notification kind of off to the side,
but all in all the whole thing is automated so I don't have to stop what I'm doing to actually
take care of this, and it's going to save me a lot of time.
Now let's talk about the benefits of, you know, why would we want to use a chatbot. I mean it
is it is nice to have that human interaction whenever you're dealing with your customers, but
I think probably the number one reason that someone may want to use a chatbot is to save
time. And what I mean by that is, you know, not only are you saving time when it comes to
like interacting with your customers and getting someone to place an order,
but again, you're leaving time off to the side for you to go, and you know,
maybe you've got to do some bookkeeping, you've got to put these floral arrangements together,
whatever it is, it's going to save you hours and hours over the course of even just a month.
Two. Simplicity.
Chatbots believe it or not are surprisingly simple to build. You don't have to know how
to write any code in most cases, if you want to do more in-depth integrations, you might need to know
some code, but for the most part it's just natural language based. You could say "Hey chatbot,
I want you to tell users that I'm open Monday through Friday 9 AM to 6 PM", and it's going to be
able to relay that information without having to know any Python, or JavaScript, or anything like
that. Lastly, time to launch. So what that means is that it does not take a lot of time to build
a chatbot. Like I said earlier, you don't have to know any code, and since it's cloud-based
you don't have to build up any of the underlying infrastructure. From the time you start building
the chatbot to the time it's completed could be as quick as one hour. And so, these are some of
the reasons that you may want to build a chatbot for your business. So I hope this helped explain
what a chatbot is, how it works, and why you may want to use it. Thank you for watching.
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