Skip to main content

Interactive Chat Response Systems

By C Chaitanya
The chat bots have arrived. Well at least thats what popular media wants you to believe. The mental image we get when we hear about Chatbots is that of some sentient program which will converse seamlessly with humans and solve our problems.

Well, version 1 of the chatbots are anything but. Because the chatbots have been so overhyped, people seem to expect a lot from them. The fact of the matter is that chat is just another medium and we still have a long way to go before computer programs understand you and answer your queries.

But thats ok.
What we have now is a step forward. Most chatbots I have encountered are nothing more than glorified "if-then-else" programs. But as long as they answer my queries, I am happy.

So, instead of calling them chatbots, maybe if we call them Interactive Chat Response Systems(ICRs),maybe people will have lesser expectations and follow the on screen prompts and get their queries resolved.

ICRs have some advantages over IVRs. Since you can use text and images and even video, an ICR can solve a lot more problems. And since most web based systems are also text based, integrating an ICR with a backend system is much more easier. The UI/UX of an ICR is also much more natural and lesser error prone than an IVR where you have to press tones many times.

Go ahead, you can converse with our Ozonetel ICR system here

Popular posts from this blog

First Post

By C Chaitanya
In this blog, I will be talking about my experiences in trying to build a cloud telephony platform , KooKoo . Along the way I will also be talking about different design choices I made, good programming practices and the IVR domain in general. For technoratti: NNFJW8EW86C3
Read more

Google's approach to business communication

By C Chaitanya
 Google has been making silent moves in the business communication space. Google has mostly lost the instant messaging wars. But it does not want to lose the business communication war. WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook have been making their own moves to enable businesses to reach their customers through their channels. Its all about who has control over the communication channels. Especially communication which leads to business. That's where the money is. Currently, Google is the king of search and most online transactions start with a Google search. FB, Amazon, Apple and others want to change that. They want the search to start on their properties. And they have started making the moves. WhatsApp business allows small businesses to conduct their transactions on WhatsApp. FB and Instagram have long supported small businesses to manage their business on their channels. Apple has also made some nice moves with Apple business chat. They have integrated a whole shopping expe
Read more

Integrating Arborjs with Angular to create a live calls dashboard

By C Chaitanya
Arborjs  is a cool graph visualization library. Angular  is one of the best JavaScript frameworks and we have been using Angular in a lot of our front end development. When you handle millions of calls, proper visualization becomes very important. Without proper visualization, you can get lost in the mountains of data. So we spend a lot of time to come up with good visualizations to represent the data. Since we loved the cool way in which Arbor represented graph data, we could not wait to hook it up with Angular. Because of Angular's two way data binding, when you hook up Angularjs with Arbor.js you can get a dynamically updated visualization of graph data with cool animations. To give back to the community, we have put up the code online at Github . Basically we have created an Angularjs directive for Arborjs. Please feel free to fork the code and add extensions and use it for your own visualizations. The code is self explanatory with comments inline. Best way to get s
Read more