Chatbots
December 13, 2021
Chatbots are one of those technologies that may seem very futuristic, but are actually already integrated into today's world. We have chatbots that help us with online shopping, banking questions, and therapy. A lot of these are just text messages between the user and some AI agent or code online, but there is so much potential to expand chatbots in the future.
One way that chatbots could be modified for the future is through the use of personas and characters. Right now, a lot of chatbots are just images that users text, like Woebot for example. This is a therapy chatbot that users text back and forth in an app. It's not a very personal form of communication, and it's certainly very different than current forms of therapy where the patient is sitting face to face with a real human.
I believe that in the future, chatbots will be 3D personas and have character traits that make them unique. There are already many companies out there trying to make this happen, and they're calling this new form of chatbot an AI avatar. These are unique because they use natural language processing and artificial intelligence to interpret and response to humans.
One company doing this is called Quantum Capture and they're making their AI avatars look very humanlike. You can see an example in Figure 2. While this looks like a great idea, I'm concerned about these avatars falling into the uncanny valley, especially because there are lots of examples of avatars that don't look quite right, like in Figure 3.
The technology itself is really promising though. I think it's a great idea to have conversational agents for people to explore different questions that they might not want to ask someone. For example, Planned Parenthood has a chatbot for pre teens to ask about love, sex, and relationships, which is great for kids who don't feel comfortable talking about this stuff with an adult. It can also be used with a group of friends together to spark conversation and exploration.
I believe that in the future, chatbots will be 3D personas and have character traits that make them unique. There are already many companies out there trying to make this happen, and they're calling this new form of chatbot an AI avatar. These are unique because they use natural language processing and artificial intelligence to interpret and response to humans.
One company doing this is called Quantum Capture and they're making their AI avatars look very humanlike. You can see an example in Figure 2. While this looks like a great idea, I'm concerned about these avatars falling into the uncanny valley, especially because there are lots of examples of avatars that don't look quite right, like in Figure 3.
The technology itself is really promising though. I think it's a great idea to have conversational agents for people to explore different questions that they might not want to ask someone. For example, Planned Parenthood has a chatbot for pre teens to ask about love, sex, and relationships, which is great for kids who don't feel comfortable talking about this stuff with an adult. It can also be used with a group of friends together to spark conversation and exploration.
Figure 1. Woebot therapy chatbot
Figure 2. Quantum Capture's humanlike AI avatar.
Figure 3. AI avatar that falls into the uncanny valley.
What do you think about the future of chatbots? Would you want to ask questions to an AI avatar knowing it's not a real person?