How Hut34 is building a technology solution to solve growing pains for bots like Telstra’s “Codi”, grow the chatbot economy and maybe even build a global superintelligence….

Chatbots present as the first point of contact for those seeking customer support and provide a solution to companies looking to handle a rise in demand while trying to keep overheads down. But current chatbots are limited. They act alone in their own little space on the internet, unable to seek additional help when the limitations in their siloed data and logic are reached. Often — too often — chatbots can’t even work out what you want, let alone the answer to your problem.

That much recently became clear when customer experiences when the Telstra chatbot,” Codi”, went public. Gaining mainstream notoriety, the incident became a trigger for a more widespread conversation about the limitations of existing chatbot technology across multiple companies.

Telstra user expresses his frustration with “Codi”

There’s nothing quite as infuriating as trying to negotiate with a machine. Thankfully, there’s hope in sight, not just for Codi, but for all the future chatbots that will be joining the AI crowd in the coming years.

Created in Sydney Australia, the Hut34 Project is a blockchain-powered platform that allows chatbots to connect to each other in such a way where, if one doesn’t know the answer to a question, the other can provide it.

In building the Hut34 platform, founder Tim McNamara started with the understanding of why chatbots aren’t able to deliver the optimal customer experience.

“Very broadly, a chatbot is just a Conversational User Interface (CUI) powered by software,” he explained. “It usually consists of or is built upon a mix or traditional code-based logic and AI components. These CUIs can be deployed via a range of pre-existing conversational channels, such as Facebook Messenger, HTML web pages and, most recently, voice-driven interfaces such as Google Home and Siri.”

“But it’s very early days with this technology and the algorithms and AI that drive these interfaces need data inputs (i.e. interactions) to learn from so they can hopefully improve. Because of this they are prone to error — especially when new — and thus it is wise at this point for chatbot creators to include the capacity for their AI to escalate any unknown or unanswerable queries to a human operator for resolution. This is determined as the best way to satisfy the customer. One day there may come a time where these bots don’t need to do this at all, but for the moment, because the fail rate can be so high, it makes good commercial sense.”

As demonstrated by Codi, but prevalent across most chatbots, there is a failure — or at least an issue — during the escalation process, where they don’t appear to be successfully escalating unanswerable queries or specific customer requests to an operator. Plus they’re also confusing customer inputs and failing to identify the customer’s intent. The need to escalate and the escalation process should improve over time as design flaws are ironed out and the understanding of AI improves. This is where Hut34 can help. This is how a chatbot service can improve.

By querying the interconnected bots and digital devices that exist in the Hut34 Network, when a bot like Codi can’t answer a customer question, its developer can give it a choice. The AI can either escalate this unanswered query to a human operator and incur all the costs involved in that (most notably labour). Or alternatively, the bot can make a request of other bots or digital services connected to the Hut34 network to see if it can resolve the customer’s ‘out of scope’ query.

If one of those other bots can correctly answer the customer’s question, then the engaged chatbot would pay it a small fee (in a cryptocurrency called Entropy). This improves the customer experience inside that company’s chatbot interface as it happens very quickly. Plus it reduces the needs (and costs) associated with the escalation to a human operator — costs that are often passed onto the customer. This keeps the customer happy and more likely to keep using the service.

“Connecting a chatbot like Codi to the Hut34 network would not only increase the informational service utility of the bot — thus making customers more likely to use it — but additionally it presents a company with an opportunity to increase its revenue. By connecting their chatbot to the network of other bots and devices, a company could cross-sell the knowledge of its bot to other networked bots and the users of other ecosystems. A variety of economic models come into existence.”

If you want to find out more about the Hut34 Project visit the website for information or join the telegram group for live chat with the community and team. ENTRP Tokens can be purchased at a range of exchanges; for more information click here.