In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Ofer Ronen, GM of Chatbase, a startup housed within Google’s Area 120. With tools for building chatbots becoming accessible, conversational interfaces are becoming more prevalent. As Ronen highlights in our conversation, chatbots are already enabling companies to automate many routine tasks (mainly in customer interaction). We are still in the early days of chatbots, but if current trends persist, we’ll see bots deployed more widely and take on more complex tasks and interactions. Gartner recently predicted that by 2021, companies will spend more on bots and chatbots than mobile app development.

Like any other software application, as bots get deployed in real-world applications, companies will need tools to monitor their performance. For a single, simple chatbot, one can imagine developers manually monitoring log files for errors and problems. Things get harder as you scale to more bots and as the bots get increasingly more complex. As in the case of other machine learning applications, when companies start deploying many more chatbots, automated tools for monitoring and diagnostics become essential.

The good news is relevant tools are beginning to emerge. In this episode, Ronen describes a tool he helped build: Chatbase is a chatbot analytics and optimization service that leverages machine learning research and technologies developed at Google. In essence, Chatbase lets companies focus on building and deploying the best possible chatbots.

Using Machine Learning to Monitor and Optimize Chatbots

O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators. At O’Reilly, a big part of our business is paying attention to what’s new and interesting in the world of technology. We have a pretty good record at having anticipated some of the big technology developments in recent history. For instance, we launched the first commercial Web site, GNN, in 1993; we organized the meeting at which the term “open source” was first adopted; we were early investors in Blogger, which helped launch the blogging revolution; and more recently, our Web 2.0 conference launched a world-wide meme. We call this predictive sense the “O’Reilly Radar.” And while we’re certainly not always right, we are, at least, good at making interesting guesses.

Our methodology is simple: we draw from the wisdom of the alpha geeks in our midst, paying attention to what’s interesting to them, amplifying these weak signals, and seeing where they fit into the innovation ecology. Add to that the original research conducted by our Research team, and you start to get a good picture of what the technology world is thinking about.

Using Machine Learning to Monitor and Optimize Chatbots

O'Reilly Radar