AI and Chatbots

Foreign. Good morning, it's a guy called Saki. I am in Sakura, Santa Cruz, California. And today you're getting, oops, you're getting a blue view. Today you're getting a different view of me because like 3 minutes ago my camera refused to go on. It was on and we were fine. And then all of a sudden I did something. I can't figure out why the camera don't go on. So I'm using now the built in imac camera so you're getting a much wider view so you can see that I truly am in a closet. So, yeah, this is a view you don't often get. Take a screenshot. It's a historical moment and I hope you'll never get it again. So, speaking of remarkable people, remarkable people guests this week was Lauren Koontz. She is the CEO of a company called Pandora Bots. And basically she is trying to commercialize and really sort of humanize and establish the use of chatbots as a technology. And so the, the chat bot that she has now is called Kooky. K U K I. And it has, it's really quite interesting. This chatbot Cookie has won many of the touring contests. The touring, the Turing Test is this concept that people interacting with a chatbot can't tell if it's a human or a bottle. And it's. No one has exactly completely passed it yet. But her chatbot Kooky has won that contest I think five times. She has a very interesting background. She, believe it or not, she has degree, two degrees in, well, one degree with a double major from Harvard, a BA and in, in two completely different majors. And after she graduated from Harvard, she spent a few years writing Romant novels and then she quote, unquote, returned to robotics, which how many people return to robotics. Most people progress to robotics. But she comes from a long family of UC Berkeley mathematicians who, shall I say, were surprised that her first career pursuit was romantic novels. So anyway, so you'll learn this week about chatbots and AI. A sheikh kind of went on the record and said she thinks it's going to be about two years before it'll be very hard for people to tell, you know, if they're dealing with a chat bot or not. Personally, I prefer dealing with a chat bot. So part of the, part of the podcast is me actually interviewing Kooky. So she set it up and I interviewed Cookie as if she was a person. And you know, there are places where she says stuff that's funny and you can tell that it's not a Human who was trying to respond, but basically it was pretty good. And listen, if I could encounter a chatbot just to provide tech support, I would be perfectly happy. But even, even that I don't think is really together yet. So if you want to learn about AI and chatbots, this week's Remarkable People podcast is Lauren Koons. Good question for us all is, you know, have you encountered a chatbot that you found satisfactory? I. I can't tell you that I have actually, but I wish I could. So let's open it up. Let me know if you've encountered a chatbot that you have found satisfactory and where, because maybe I'll go try it. So, any questions? Jerry? Her name is Kuki K U K I. Which is kind of odd you would think you would name a, a chatbot that's artificially intelligent. An intelligent sounding name, but what do I know? So, okay, so let's see, I'm looking for the comments here, and if you have any questions and you can ask anything. So, yeah, these days I've been doing a lot of Clubhouse, so. And on Clubhouse, there's kind of two theories of clubhouses. One is you go into a room and you just lurk and listen. You can also go into a room that's ongoing and then you get invited on stage and then you have the privilege of asking questions. And there's another theory where you create your own room and then you invite people on stage to join you and then you have a discussion about a particular topic. I, of course, have another theory, which is I establish a room. Usually I call it ask me anything. And I have a rule on clubhouse that no one else has, which is when I have a room on Clubhouse, I'm on stage and I'm the administrator moderator, and I only allow women to ask questions. And this is because I think that the voice of women has been suppressed for so long that I'm doing my tiny little bit to enable more women to have a voice and a seat at the table. So if you come on to my clubhouse, ask me anything. If you're not a woman, you are not going to be able to ask a question. So, okay, so, Jeff, I'm sorry, I didn't see that. How do you see the use of chatbot? Whereas the technology has not been completely developed and widespread use, I think the obvious first place for a chatbot is kind of providing, you know, base level tech support, customer support. And I would be happy with that because I don't know about you, but I am just sick of being on hold for. Oh, my God. I spent half my life on Verizon on hold. So, yeah, if they could just help me solve that. Of course, you know, the ultimate in customer service is that you create a system that doesn't require customer support. What a concept. In my case, I'll tell you, this is like real life. So I am a Verizon business account holder because I have, like, I have a watch, I have an I. I have an iPad, and I have. See, I have five phones on it, so I have a lot of accounts. And. And I'll tell you something, pairing an Apple watch and a Verizon phone takes an act of God, and then this act of God has to be repeated, because every time, like, I damaged the watch, so I got another watch. So first I had the watch working that took an act of God, and then the watch was damaged, so I got a replacement watch, so that took an act of God. And then iPhone 12 Pro, Max, whatever came out. So now it's a new phone, so that took an act of God. And so right now, my Apple Watch is not paired to my Apple phone. So that means that this watch that I have, which has cellular service, cannot get messages, cannot take phone calls, cannot do anything because it's not paired yet. And I have spent so far about two hours on the phone. And of course, the way it works with Verizon is, you know, after you get through their phone tree, the first person comes on and I say, listen, what I'm going to ask you to do is very hard. I've done this three or four times. If you haven't done it before, trust me, you don't want to do it. So just, like, elevate my case right now. And they say, oh, no, no, no, I've done it. And then, of course, they can't do it. And then it has to go through two levels of elevation. So this is not the anti Verizon live video. But I'm just telling you, that's why I want chatbots. So chat bots that either can handle that or even better, make it so that you can truly just pair your watch in your phone without a chat bot. So anyway, is there quality most distinguished personality from AI? I don't know if it's the personality, but my experience is just they. They don't quite get the nuances of a question. And. And I can't say that I blame them because some of it is very nuanced. And so, yeah, they. I think, you know, mostly they're looking for sort of factual Questions like, so, like, you know, who is Guy Kawasaki? Well, you know, Kooky can go to the Wikipedia entry and then read that back to you and tell you who Guy Kawasaki is. But if, if it's a more subtle question, like, I don't know, he's a Guy Kawasaki funny, or what's he most famous for? Or what's. What's the mistakes he made? And those kind of questions, it's a human would have to kind of interpret, kind of throw them for a loop and gives you some very funny results. Actually. Do you think that chat, I think you're trying to say chat bots are not. Are better than email? Well, I mean, it kind of depends what's generating the emails. So if it's, if it's AI generating the email, it's probably a tie. If it's a human generating the email, hopefully that, that human, you know, truly understands what you're asking. So that would be the determining factors who write. Who's writing the email. Okay, what else? What all cookie can do. Is it for customer support function only? I would say that cookie right now is more a demonstration of what a chatbot can do. A cookie is not really commercially applied yet. But, you know, Lauren Coons addresses this kind of issue in, in the episode. So what else there? Orbee Parker has great checkbots. Huh? So, yeah, let's go buy some glasses today. So. And Warby Parker also has really good, you know, you, you put your face up there and it does augmented reality and shows you what your face would look like with those various glasses. So Warby Parker definitely has its tech game together. Yeah. Let's see what else you got here. Ah, Please share one or more productive rooms on Clubhouse. Huh? Oh, yeah, it's not that there aren't productive rooms. I just don't know the names of them because with Clubhouse, I basically cruise. And so I don't really. God, I don't memorize the names. I think, I think one of the things that many people will find about Clubhouse is that it is an echo chamber of marketing people talking to marketing people. And many of the rooms are about, you know, so it is. This is how you can be an influencer and this is how you can position yourself as a thought leader. And, you know, go to my Instagram account and you'll find a link there for a free video. And then if you like the video, come to my seminar or by my book. And so a lot of it is marketers talking to marketers, each convincing the other how successful they are. And they have the secret to getting rich quick. And I think if Clubhouse is going to have any kind of staying power, it has to get out of that stage because just marketers talking about marketing isn't going to cut it. So what else there are or are there best situations to use chatbot and bestie human? I think that's to be determined. And like right now, as I said, I would be happy if chatbots could just handle some of the simplest tech support and customer service questions, even if the answer is just to point you to a link and, you know, in two years, as they get more and more sophisticated, I look forward to the day. A very interesting side note is that I've, I obviously do, or we publish one episode per week, so we've done about 65 episodes. And you will. The interesting thing is that the recording of Kooky the Chatbot needed the least amount of editing of any interview I've done. Which you could say, well, it's because the chatbot has simplistic answers. But one thing that a chatbot doesn't do and which requires a lot of editing is chatbots never use filler words. So you would be amazed. Like, even the most remarkable, intelligent people, if you look at their verbatim transcript, they say things like, ah, you know, right. Hundreds of times in an hour. And to the utter dismay of Jeff C. And Pig Fitzpatrick, who are part of the Remarkable People team, I like to cut all those filler words. And so chatbots, there's, there's some advantages to a chat bot. So they never use filler words. Guess what? They're always on, on brand, right? They're, they're never gonna go like, go off into the deep talking about politics or sex. They work 24 by 7 by 365. I would say that, you know, a chatbot hosted at Amazon Web Services is probably more reliable than a human, if you want it. And so creating a chatbot influencer with a, you know, AI generated face, that sounds a lot better than worrying about whether your, your, your influencer is going to go off the deep end one day. So there are a lot of advantages there. And it's interesting, I read an article that during the pandemic, believe it or not, chatbots have, have served a meaningful purpose with people who are isolated during the pandemic, which is kind of a head scratcher there. So what else? I did my PhD dissertation by developing a chatbot that converses with heart failure patients. That's interesting. So, so I guess, you know, when you can narrow it down to a specific topic like heart failure. I would think you could make a chatbot extremely intelligent and sophisticated. I also think it's kind of scary because then, you know what if people depend on that for advice, there's got to be liability issues there. But I'm sure you figured that out. So. Is there any algorithm for chatbot could understand for problem customers? Should needs get support from real people and divert customer? Is there any algorithm for chatbots, let's say, to understand Burkhead? I, I hope so. I mean I think that's the holy grail where a chatbot could more or less understand a human problem and you know, solve that. A lot of it. There's a lot of stuff going on, right? So first of all you need speech recognition so you can get the question into the chatbot. Then you need the intelligence and the machine learning. Once you got the information into the chatbot, you know, what's the answer? And then you need speech synthesis to get it back out. And then with the chatbot you need something that changes the facial expressions. There's a lot of stuff going on there. So it's amazing it works as well as it does. Do you think that the fact based limitations of chatbots suffice use cases like customer service? I actually do. I, I think that they could probably cover 80% of the typical customer service questions. So yeah, I do actually. And, and it's kind of very esoteric. Like, well, it'd be interesting, right? So I could go to a chatbot and say, so my camera is no longer broadcasting video and could the chatbot at some level is going to be really stupid, right? Like, so is your camera turned on? But I mean the questions are finite and the possible problems are finite. So I would think that I would, I would love. Okay, this would be an interesting case, right? So if Verizon could have a chatbot that I could say, you know, let's say it's Vuki instead of cookie. So Vuki, I need to pair my Apple Watch with my iPhone Pro Max 12 or whatever it's called. And the chatbot would say, do you have a personal or business account? And I would say business account. Because right now if you go to Verizon and do that, the next step it says is you have an account type issue, call 800-whatever. So then it would say, okay, so now we know the guy has an enterprise account and he's trying to pair it to an iPhone. And so, you know, then it could ask at least the IMEI numbers. It could Ask, you know, some of that basic information, which takes about 20 minutes on the phone already, so at least you could prep the human to actually, you know, do the fixing with all the information that it needs. So anyway, that's my dream. Let's see. Madison Reed uses chatbots, too. Now, how would you know that, Peg? Are you implying that your hair is not naturally that beautiful? So, yeah. Madison Reed also uses a chatbot to help you decide on your hair color foreign. Let's see if the journeys are not simplified and Opera needs to rely significantly on her experience. How to, to do. How, how to do. Suggest introduce chatbot. Do we need to set base before introducing chatbots? I don't know. I, I would think that the Holy Grail is you don't need to set the base and, you know, you don't need, you don't set the base with a human, so why should you have to set the base with a chatbot? But again, I think we're just early in the game. Someday, I think it's going to replace a lot of that. Would you consider Alexa an AI bot? Huh? That's an interesting question. See, how do I use Alexa? I use Alexa to turn on the light. I use Alexa to tell me surf conditions. I use Alexa to make phone calls. So I don't know if it's a chatbot because it's not like I'm having a real conversation with Alexa. With Alexa, it's more. It's kind of automation as opposed to chat, in my mind, at least the way I use Alexa now. So, so, but it's close. It's close. When will we get to the point where chatbots are, are not just answering FAQs and doing some analysis? I would say the proverbial two years, which, if you know tech people, they always say something that they have no idea about when it's going to happen. They always say two years. So it's the proverbial two years. But it seems like it's two years is kind of. It's like asking a programmer, when are you going to be done? And they say, oh, in about a month. That means they don't know at all. Yeah, yeah. A chatbot cannot convince customers as much as Richard Branson, that's for sure. On the other hand, I wasn't asking Richard Branson to pair my watch and phone. Do you think using chatbots might boost brand loyalty? Yes, I do, actually. I mean, as you can see, or as you heard, you know, Madison Reed, the hair color company, and Warby Parker both use chatbots and my experience with both of them is positive. So, you know, do I care if I'm talking to a chatbot or I'm talking to a human? If I can resolve, you know, if I could call Verizon and get my problem resolved, do I care if it's a chatbot or a human? Not at all. I prefer a chatbot because just like a whole Verizon thread here. But like Verizon, believe it or not, enterprise Verizon customers, you can only call between 9 and 6, Monday through Friday. Like wrap your mind around that. I thought if you're an enterprise customer, you're supposed to get better service. So, you know, chatbots don't need to take the weekends off. And chatbots don't get viruses. Well, not pandemic kind of viruses. They may get computer viruses. So, yeah, how many of us dealt with chatbots handling the front end of customer service or entry phone calls? I think more and more. Absolutely. Yes. So, Peg Fitzpatrick. My hair is Madison Reed Beautiful. Of course it is. My hair is not Madison Reed. But wait, wait, hang on for a second. Good thing I got pants on. I do have a box of Madison Reed hair color for men. Actually, I have two boxes and I, I just haven't tried it yet because there is a possibility that they're going to use me for something. And so I thought, well, if they're going to use me for something, maybe they want a before and after, so I shouldn't use it yet because there'll be no before. And so and they swear that if I used it, it's not going to turn all the white into black. And all of a sudden I'm going to be looking like Wayne Newton. They said that first of all, you can wash it out if you wash it three or four times, but really it's to kind of slightly change the color as opposed to make me all go all, you know, black hair, which would be funny. So, yeah, let's see. Are there inexpensive chatbot platforms for businesses to use versus complete propriety development? What companies are leading this? I don't know the answer to that question. There are hundreds of companies that provide chatbots, but I don't know about their quality because I'm just not an A.I. kind of guy. So, yeah, let's see. How well can a chatbot learn? Well, you know, there's some funny stuff. So I think the, the Facebook is the Facebook or I think the Microsoft chatbot. What, what people do for chatbots to learn is they, they let them learn from Reddit. Or you know, tweets or something. And so let's say, let's say your chatbot is learning from Reddit and let's just say there are parts of Reddit where you wouldn't want them to learn what's going on in Reddit. And I think that's where the Microsoft chatbot went off the rails and became racist because it was learning from Reddit, which is kind of funny, shows you what's on Reddit. Yeah, that's a very interesting question. Where do you get the data to teach the chatbot what humans are like? Or you know, maybe you want a racist chatbot to match your customers. I don't know, RNC could use that. So let's see. Chat is for devices, systems and most connected services seem like a bad fix for bad system that should fix themselves. Yeah, talk is cheap. David Inner Simone Is there any current work going on polyglot chatbots or chatbots understand slang non linear conversation? I guarantee you there's work going on like that. Because I mean, in a sense if, if a chatbot isn't polyglot or understand slang, it's just not going to work in the real world because you know, what can I say? Be interesting if you said to a chatbot, well let's let it rip and see what happens. See what the chatbot thinks that means in Australia the chatbot might fart. So, you know, who knows. So let's see any more things? Well, again, this week's guest was the inimitable Lauren Coons, CEO of Pandora Bots. And, and let's see, I'll tell you who is coming. And so you know, I'm getting my app open here. So next week is Colin Breyer. Colin Breyer was the chief of staff of Jeff Bezos. After that it's Lovey Ajayi who is my favorite Nigerian man. She's a funny woman. So between Colon and Briar and Lauren, you know, we're gonna cover a wide selection of topics. We're going from chatbots to what makes Amazon great. To love you Ajayi. It's hard to categorize what Lovey Ajay talked about because she's so freaking fun. It's like one of the funniest episodes ever. And I want to be an honorary Nigerian. Nigerians have such good insults. Oh my God, Nigerians know how to insult people. That is just a special skill. So let's see any more questions? Because I'm gonna go surfing right now. Well, first I'm gonna figure out why this camera is not working. Let's see. Let's see. So I think that's it, Jeff. So everybody have a great week. It's only Wednesday, so two more days and it's the weekend. Although in the pandemic, it's like Groundhog Day. Every day. Every day is the same for me. So, yeah. So again, Lauren Coons, CEO of Pandora Bots. And maybe a first. Well, I don't know, at least in early. I have a chatbot on my podcast recorded, so I'm talking to a chat bot. And again next week is Colin Breyer, who is the former chief of staff of Jeff Bezos. And after that, Lavia. So we are quite the lineup coming for you. So yeah, it's been fun and take care and I'll see you next week and may also join me on Clubhouse. I'm on Clubhouse. Well, follow me on Clubhouse. That way you'll get a notice when I'm there because I, I have not exactly systematized my appearance on Clubhouse. It's kind of like it depends on, depends on who's at home. It depends on what the tide is like, because if I had a choice between going on Clubhouse or surfing, I go surfing. So if you have a pretty good rule of thumb is check the tide in Santa Cruz. And if it's high tide, is much more likely that I will be on Clubhouse because where I surf, it's best to surf at low tide. So when you see high tide and lousy weather, I probably will be on Clubhouse. And I usually name my room ask Me Anything. But again, when I do my room Ask Me Anything. I only let women ask questions. So just be prepared for that kind of unusual perspective on social media. Okay? So thank you very much, remarkablepeople.com please go there and and download and subscribe to my podcast. Take care. Bye.