When you contact a business or service and are met by a friendly digital voice offering assistance, you are often interacting with a chatbot - a program designed to mimic human conversation and steer your inquiries to a successful conclusion. However, anyone who has spent time navigating such systems understands that these conversational abilities can be rather limited and robotic. With patent number US11798539B2, Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories aims to solve this problem.
The issue is twofold: the first part rests with the chatbots themselves, which often fall short in their understanding of our inquiries due to the complexities and nuances of human language. The second part lies with businesses and organizations that must methodically comb through countless customer interactions to manually train these chatbots on relevant phrases or 'intents' - a time-consuming and costly process.
Genesys' recently unveiled solution proposes an innovative method to teach chatbots new phrases, improving their understanding and responses. The patent, titled "Systems and methods relating to bot authoring by mining intents from conversation data via intent seeding," proposes using a special program that studies conversation data and picks out new understandings, or 'intents', to add to the chatbot's knowledge base.
Think of it as a way to make our automated helpers smarter; they learn from past conversations, extract usable language data, and step up their game for the next interaction.
Consider a world post-adoption of this patent where chatbots are considerably more efficient than they are today - able to understand a broader range of inquiries and provide accurate, intuitive responses. This could mean anything from an online help desk that understands and swiftly resolves your issue without the need for human intervention to a telecommunications service call that feels less like a maze of preprogrammed phrases and more like a conversation with an intuitive, resourceful assistant.
While this patent undoubtedly holds the potential to transform chatbot technology and customer service interactions significantly, it is also important to note that being granted a patent does not guarantee a product will eventually hit the market. Nevertheless, such innovations suggest that a future with more reliable and natural conversation with our digital assistants might not be too far away.
P.S. This patent and its potential impact on chatbots and customer service automation represent forward-thinking innovation. However, there is no absolute certainty that it will make its way into the market. So, while we hope for a future with more fluent digital assistants, we'll need to wait and see if this technology will be actualized.