If you have been following my articles, I am building a AI (Artificial Intelligence) Chatbot to negotiate with people who want to buy a car. If you scroll through my past articles, you will find the genesis of this idea and why I think that it will work.
In the art of negotiation, humans can rely on visual and other cues to determine the emotional impact of what they are saying. They can intuit if the person is becoming frustrated, angry, bored or eager. Chatbots do not have that facility. But since it is such an important facet of dealing with human carbon units, it has to be taken into account.
I have already outlined by strategies for cognition and context recognition for my chatbot using neurals nets, NLP (Natural Language Processing) and AIML (or Artificial Intelligence Markup Language). What I want this chatbot to do, is to get smarter with each negotiation that it conducts. The learning aspect has to happen to make this thing commercially useful.
The algorithm will be an emotion association spanning the range from "I am so angry that I could kill someone!" to Neutral to "I am so ecstatically happy that I could kiss you." So how would this work? Obvious the first step is to identify word predicates with emotional state in some sort of dictionary. This would be a starting point. However in a learning mode, if the emotion was ambiguous to the chatbot, it will popup a short array of emojis that represent an emotional state and click on a rating of 1 to 5 to represent the degree. Then the AI machines take over an link answer length, specific words, capitalization and behaviors to teach the chatbot the emotional state within the context of the answer.
How will knowing the emotional state help? This chatbot, as iterated, is a negotiation chatbot. It will have a range of strategies. As it detects frustration, it will take a softer, less aggressive approach to counter-offering. If the negotiation goes off the rails into la-la land, with a ridiculous counter offer, the chatbox may in fact, shut down the negotiations and politely thank the person and call for a human intervention. If it detects that it is on-track to close a sale, it may take a more sophisticated approach and try to up-sell services or ad-ons.
The emotion detection framework is a necessary adjunct to selling to humans, and it has applications over a wide spectrum of chatbot applications, including a help-desk service chatbot that helps people solves problems without endlessly waiting for a service agent while listening to elevator muzak and wasting valuable time.
This is just one more step in eliminating the frustrations of dealing with human-condition vagaries when undertaking a commercial transaction.
Stay tuned for more on this journey.
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