Cloud Telephony Experiments

It seems like every other day now we get a blog post about how one technology/channel is dead and how this new thing is now the best thing since sliced bread. First they said the phone call is dead. Not . Then they said email is dead. Or support over email is dead. etc etc. Not Though these may be ok to get page views, the reality of the matter is quite different. Phone calls and Email usage has not gone down ( for businesses, its a different story for B2C). In fact it has increased. And all the blog posts take some example of a bad implementation and highlight what is wrong with the old technology or channel. Problem is even in the new channels, in app support etc there are some very bad examples. But that does not mean that the problem is with the channels. The problem is with the implementations. Flickr For example, very few IVR systems use the context of the caller and provide help. Very few use speech recognition technologies which have improved by leaps and

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

You can play with the StoryBot here Ever since bots have arrived on KooKoo , I have been thinking of what cool bots should I build for a demo. There are already a lot of cool bots being built for some of the startups we work with, but they are all in stealth mode :) So I went ahead and built a story bot on Facebook messenger using KooKoo . The stories from the wonderful people at Storyweaver . Since the stories have a creative commons license, I went ahead and used the stories. The design is pretty simple. Each story is in a directory and when a user sends a FB message, a random story is displayed to the user. The user can then interact and go to next pages or stop the conversation and start a new story. The idea is to make this an interactive story bot which encourages kids and parents to read together with questions and answers about the story etc. Please leave your suggestions in the comments below. You can download the code here at Github  and build your own StoryBo