Recently we’ve been seeing in the media how robots/chatbots/AI (artificial intelligence) are transforming how we do things and how robots might one day take over the world and we humans will become superfluous to most tasks.  Worries over AI and how robots will become sentient beings has been dramatized in Channel 4’s ‘Humans’.  That’s all well and good, but for now, the area that excites me the most is how chatbots will take over the delivery of repeatable knowledge that Tier 1 (lowest level) support technicians/engineers deal with via call centres.   Most of us will have been on such a call to a support centre, to fix a software bug or a hardware issue, and been asked questions that are obviously being read from a script. Unfortunately, they need to assume one has zero computer knowledge and the pace is exhaustingly slow and incredibly boring for the likes of me. Indeed, I would be most surprised if that script isn’t in a decision-tree flowchart format whereby if the … [Read more...]