A year ago, I made a travel chatbot called Taylor. It uses data from Nomad List to give you recommendations on where to go and also tells you where you can work and sleep.
I launched it to Product Hunt and it did pretty well. Thousands of people have since used it.
I used stock photos to add a human persona behind the text-only chat bot.
@KateKendall made a good point how most chat bots have female names:
Please stop branding artificial intelligence companies with female names. Especially the assistant-style ones.
— Kate Kendall (@KateKendall) July 17, 2015
Mine was a unisex name (Taylor), but the original persona behind it was still a female:
I listened and added two other personas:
New users of Taylor bot were randomized and were sent to one of the three personas.
@KateKendall Hey Kate, I've listened to this and updated http://t.co/K1rkZCxgFb now and made it unisex (see switch at top right)
— levels (@levelsio) August 24, 2015
Now, here it comes. Taylor has a feedback option:
It’s used to give feedback about how the bot is doing its job.
It usually goes fine:
Here too:
The Asian female though:
P.S. I wrote a book on building indie startups called MAKE. And I'm on Twitter too if you'd like to follow more of my stories. I don't use email so tweet me your questions. Or you can see my list of posts. To get an alert when I write a new blog post, you can subscribe below:
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