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digital money
Rise of the Bots
automatically. It has big potential to enhance service o erings and increase customer engagement.”
Keith Bossey, senior vice president, nancial services at GfK, believes the technology is de nitely going to stick around. He points out that companies have been mining customer data for years, and now that chatbots can be used for tasks such as banking and shopping, rms can leverage that data more e ectively. In just a few years, interactions between consumers and chatbots are going to be commonplace, he predicts.
What the heck is a chatBot?
We Have Lifto
In the latter half of 2016, several companies, including Mastercard, Bank of America, American Express and Facebook, began implementing bots or announced plans to do so.
Following the launch of a chatbot America Express developed in- house in September, in which cardholders could receive purchase noti cations and other information through Facebook Messenger, the payments network enhanced the service through an “Add a Card” feature. It enables U.S. consumer and OPEN card members to add
American Express card and billing information to their Facebook accounts to make in-game pur- chases, shop on businesses’ Facebook pages and participate in Messenger commerce transactions.
Facebook’s Messenger platform enables chatbots to accept pay- ments, allowing Messenger users to make payments within Messen- ger threads, without leaving the app. Messenger users will see
“buy now” links appear in chats, and tapping the links will bring up a checkout screen populated with the payment method consumers have on le with their Facebook or Messenger accounts. Companies whose bots are integrated into Facebook have access to1billion users in 200 countries who use Messenger monthly, and develop- ers and businesses have built more than 30,000 bots for the app, according to the social network.
Dror Oren, vice president of product
and co-founder of bot developer Kasisto, explains what a chatbot is.
“A chatbot is software with a conver- sational interface that mimics human-like conversations and, depending on how smart it is, performs a range of tasks on behalf of users. Chatbots can converse with people via text or voice in mobile apps, the Web, messaging platforms and
IoT [Internet of Things] hardware. The functionality and technology behind chatbots vary greatly. We call chatbots built with arti cial intelligence and deep domain expertise ‘smart bots’ because they do more than chatbots that simply search for responses. Smart bots use insights to create experi- ences that are contextual, predictive and personal. And, for bots to truly hold an intelligent conversation, they need to be uent in the business they serve. That’s why smart bots are trained with industry-speci c natural language understanding and reasoning.”
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