Chatbots and future
If you browse the internet on the subject of the most discussed topics, you will find out that the latest most popular concepts are chatbots and blockchain. It is no wonder, because both of them influenced IT-industries a lot.
Some IT-experts have already expressed the opinion that chatbots are going to stamp mobile apps out of business. It is just a matter of time and scope of tasks that could be easily solved applying this technology.
Chatbots are already able to replace a person “on the other end of the wire”. Not to the full extent yet, but soon, they will provide an opportunity for companies to let out an enormous amount of resources if they are only ready to take the risk of purchasing or developing their own chatbots.Using chatbots gives the company an impressive potential of successful further development that is limited by the company’s preferences only.
At the first glance at the possibilities of this technology you can already realize that it represents a fresh ground for utilization of such capabilities as: collection and analysis of user data, data structuring, different dialogue utilities, and predictive analytics.The chatbot technology can give a significant boost to the business’s level of quality. That is due to the fact that prediction of user preferences is a very complicated process. The ability to do that is considered to be almost equal in difficulty to aerobatic maneuvering.
Recommendation websites are still very popular. So how much does applying chatbots in this field possibly raise conversion? Chatbot utilities have a strong advantage over “soulless” apps implemented by calculating specific recommendations for each website user depending on their behavior on the web. Mobile apps submit each user to the same algorithm, so the final recommendations become similar. In turn, chatbots personalize suggested recommendations for each user and can take their overall behavior into consideration.
In prospect, such feature can create endless variety in the audience segmentation and provide users with an opportunity to get the most congruent alternatives of recommendations — offer them “essentials”. Chatbots will soon be able to understand the user’s current mood and optimize it with special offers if it suddenly spoils. In such manner, services of this type will gradually become indispensable for the user. However, there is are also some unwanted effects to be considered.
Stranger Danger
Stranger Danger means unfamiliar hazard. This term appeared in computer sciences relatively recently but the phenomenon had existed before. There are many reasons for that. With each year technologies tend to become more of an essential part of people’s lives. At the same time, the number of web-threats also grows. It is important noticing that as the number of automatized transactions in different spheres of life increases, the number of chatbots able to cope with them without human operator increases as well.
Factors like a simple interface and a growing quantity of available solutions boost the danger level of suchlike transactions. As a result, such threats as phishing, brand distortion, transactional attacks and illegitimate way of using resources appear due to information distortion. Effects of such negative interaction may spoil the brands reputation, cause a loss of trust between user and technology and create opportunities for further attacks.
There are a lot of platforms which offer a possibility to create your own chatbot for every type of organization or agency. Facebook Messenger, Telegram, WhatsApp, Vk and Wechat offer such a possibility and plenty of users employ their services. However, can you be sure that you communicate with a certain company’s chatbot and have not just entered a compromised page? How can you find out whether this chatbot is a real company’s representative or not?
The most basic criterion is other users feedback, but we all know that there is a bunch of companies, which pay for positive feedback in order to increase their popularity, so analyzing user feedback is not a trust index anymore. You can use a blockchain technology to figure out whether the feedback is real or not. In the field where this technology is involved, falsification becomes much more uncommon.
Thus, what benefits does it bring? Firstly, using blockchain, we get trust for those companies that honestly conduct their business, but do not have enough feedback to acquire an integral reputation yet. There is no doubt that long positive review history is an advantage for each representative. However, what should young business persons do in order to reach a similar level of trust?
They should use trusted chatbots based on blockchain technology — it is the fastest way to prove one’s integrity. After that, a question of a trusted chatbots authenticity appears. How can a user rely on a chatbot and be sure that it has conducted a sufficient number of transactions? How can user verify the chatbots trustworthiness? Does checking a number of conducted transactions help figuring it out? What will happen if a user finally gets an opportunity to discover the real number of confirmed transactions via that chatbot? In such case, they could easily figure out whether they can trust the particular chatbot or not.
Possible solutions
One of the possible solutions for this problem is Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). The essence of this method is a special algorithm that identifies the chatbots actions and shows the Trust Score for transactions from which an average user can infer whether this chatbot deserves trust or not.
Trust Score is a mechanism, which is essentially a transactions registry that contains data on successfully verified transactions. Transaction validation involves each of the independent participants, so it is impossible to influence their solution or to confirm an operation without their agreement.
The foregoing provides the high level of security during the insertion of transaction status into the registry. Thus, the DTL provides an opportunity to check the Trust Score and estimate the risk of interaction with a certain chatbot. Information in registry consists of the date, time and transaction status. In the end of each operation, its participants would only have to check the correctness of this transaction and put it down into the registry. Each user can estimate the chatbots reliability based on the number of verified transactions.Trust Score statistics are available for each user of DTL, so DTL is considered to be a powerful tool in the system of communication between chatbot and humans.
Blockchain based solutions
Let us go deeper into DLT/blockchain and the problem of chatbots trust verification and figure out the way this technology may provide to the solution of the problem. This technology is quite common and it has been already approved, so the opportunities it provides to verify each kind of transaction between counterparties become very important.
The basis of blockchain technology is very simple and comes down to the following algorithm: there is a record of transaction operated between two counterparties. It is sent by the DLT to a register journal on regular basis. Each counterparty has their copied sample of register journal. If someone tries to delete or edit details of a transaction, the system will not let them do that because firstly it will compare the record with other counterparties’ register journals.
This system is very difficult to forge because it is distributed among all the participants and does not have a centralized management. The level of safety of the system rises alongside the number of counterparties, so it becomes even more reliable as time passes. The blockchain technology could be applied to chatbots too. In such case, counterparties give the chatbot a mark which is converted into Trust Score.
Each operation is recorded in a register journal and consists of the date, time and mark. Thus, no one is able to fake or increase the number of records for the given chatbot. Based on the score, each user may decide whether he trusts a given chatbot or not.
In relation to the previously mentioned, we can infer the key principle of the blockchain — the user can figure out himself whether certain records are correct or not. Implementation of this technology reveals great opportunities — from application of IoT (Internet of Things) to two-way confirmation type of records. It may be useful even in quite small businesses. You could not only manage personal or wholesale transactions but also remotely conclude smart-contracts via the chatbot with its Trust Score confirmed by the blockchain technology.
Smart-contract is a technology that allows you to exchange different types of assets (money, private property, shares). We can conclude that each type of business could automatize operation of smart-contracts developed for a certain customer.
Our solution
As we previously mentioned, there are a lot of platforms which provide an opportunity to create your own chatbots, such as Facebook Messenger, Viber, Telegram and others. But is there an opportunity to gather them in a single space? Not the platforms themselves, to be exact, but their respective chatbots. Such possibility already exists.
A technology that provides the implementation of such a strategy and solves the problem of inter-platform communication between users is represented by BRN.AI (TRUSTWORTHY CHATBOT). BRN.AI is a cloud technology based on a marketing automatization platform. With its help, you get an ultimate possibility to communicate with your clients via trusted chatbots, which are based on blockchain technology, in several different messengers.