Case Summary

I can't disclose the company I did this for so I will refer to them as the MCU, for Mystery Company Undisclosed.

The MCU needed to reduce the amount of human support needed to attend the high amount of customer support requests that they were getting every day, so they turned to the team of skilled developers I was part of to create a chatbot that would handle the first layer of customer service duties.

We used React JS, and the Spring Java framework, to build a small web application that would feature a chat window popping up from the bottom right corner of a desktop browser screen to offer the user help. When the user wrote what they needed and pressed send, the app would communicate with Google's DialogFlow service to figure out what the intent of the customer's message was.

I left the project before MCU had reached a decision regarding wether or not they would use the project, so I don't know what eneded up happening to it.

My Take

It was interesting to have that first-hand experience developing with AI. Without AI, we have such a controlled flow of processing information. We take the user's input as is, and then do any necessary processing with such input. With AI, we get to open a new terrain of software development that takes instead statistically inferred intentions from the user's input. Allowing for easier to use user interfaces, but also adding the complexity of correctly inferring the user's intentions.