How to Make Your Chatbot More Human-Like

Continuing Evolution of Healthcare AI Improves Consumer Experience

// By Althea Fung //

Chatbots — a computer program or artificial intelligence (AI) that has text or voice conversations — are redefining customer service, especially in healthcare. A 2017 Juniper Research study found that healthcare providers that use chatbots can expect average time savings of just over four minutes per inquiry, with average cost savings in the range of $0.50-$0.70 per interaction.

While the success of the chatbot is often calculated in saved nickels and dimes, a bot’s ability to provide a “human-like” experience is also an important indicator of success. One of the most significant challenges facing bots is how to make the conversation feel natural.

For Brian Gresh, president of Loyal, an Atlanta-based healthcare tech company that created the chatbot platform Guide, the first step in addressing the “human speak” challenge is understanding what the user wants.

Brian Gresh, president, Loyal

“Chatbots use natural language processing (NLP), which trains computers to identify the intent of the user. NLP breaks that down into words and phrases to understand the person’s intent, and directs them to the right content,” Gresh says. “To do that, you have to feed different conversations and data into the AI and through that process train the AI to understand the intent of the questions.”

To understand what the end user wants, Loyal works with organizations like Adventist HealthCare to first identify what problems the bot is helping the end user to solve. “There’s real value in having a vendor that can take past learnings from other clients to help us get out the door,” says Richard Rinaudot, digital marketing director at Adventist HealthCare.

Log in below to access this content: