Talla Company Blog

One of the contributing factors to social media addiction is FOMO, or fear of missing out. It's an unhealthy condition wherein smartphone users constantly check their notifications for fear they are being left out of rewarding social situations. It is a terrible reason to use -- or not use -- your smartphone or social media.

Unfortunately, a similar mal-adaptation is driving the artificial intelligence strategy at many businesses. They have FOMAI, fear of missing artificial intelligence.

At Talla, we have an automation platform for support teams that automates much of the support process away. It's a combination of a very different knowledge base (although we work with other KBs) and a chatbot. What is unique about our product is that you don't have to script out anything. You don't have to build bot decision trees. The bot learns from your Support documentation like a human would. Then it connects to your other Support systems to take action. Instead of a search engine, it's an action and automation engine that you can control from a web, or chat interface. (Plug: If that sounds cool, get a demo.)

Customer support is one of the most challenging, time-consuming, and costly aspects of any business, but artificial intelligence software can help make your customer support team more efficient. Below are five steps in your tech support workflow that AI can speed up, simplify, or streamline.

Artificial intelligence technology has matured to the point you can entrust AI bots to handle many customer service functions, but new AI tech means new AI bugs that many organizations have never seen before. Below are some of the most famous cases of "good bots gone bad" and the underlying bugs you need to prepare for when AI takes the reins of your customer interactions.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is growing increasingly popular and forcing businesses to restructure the way they are run. The implementation of both intelligent assistants and chat platforms are a popular point of entry. Intelligent assistants and bots let employees automate away repetitive tasks, improving communication, and workflow at a company. 

Will my job exist in five years? Is artificial intelligence (AI) going to replace me?  

If you ask yourself these questions when you first hear about emerging technology like an intelligent chatbot assistant, you’re not alone. It’s hard to predict what the next trendy tool will be and what impact, if any, it will have on your day-to-day life.

Being the lead designer for Talla has been an exercise in navigating uncharted territory. Talla was founded to bring real artificial intelligence to chatbots in conversational systems like Slack. We started in 2015, several months before the Slack app store even existed.We had to learn everything; there was no playbook out there for how to create a product like this.

When I make sales calls on behalf of Talla, I often run into a type of prospect I like to call the blue-collar tech worker. These are the everyday men and women who work in the trenches of IT, keeping hardware and software running on a tight budget with few resources. The blue-collar tech worker isn't the CIO or chief architect, he's the guy snaking CAT 5 cable through a drop ceiling, or the gal answering the panicked "my email is down" message at 2am on a Saturday and they are extremely valuable to the organization.   

We've now had thousands of companies try Talla, and we have learned a lot from our metrics about how people evaluate bots and conversational interfaces.  The most interesting thing so far is that when the Talla trial ends, most enterprises don't make a decision to buy or pass - they email us and ask for a trial extension because they don't feel like they have evaluated it enough.  As we dug into this issue, our analysis of the data and discussions with customers in the trial process allowed us to develop a few hypotheses about why this happens.   The number 1 issue seems to be that, given the open ended nature of a conversational interface, it is difficult to know when you have said enough things to it to know it works well.  With that in mind, here is our recommendation for how you evaluate bots and conversational interfaces in general, and then we will write a follow up post for evaluating Talla specifically.

Sharing information has never been more important than today. In the digital revolution, chat is transforming the way we access information in the workplace and stay ahead of the game in a rapidly evolving market. Much of that evolution includes chat itself. With recent chat products like Microsoft Teams (and Talla!), we’re seeing a new technology emerge in the competitive business arena.