The document discusses chatbots and voice assistants, their current capabilities, and what is needed for them to be more effective. It notes that while current voice assistants are unlikely to pass the Turing test, usage is growing rapidly. For chatbots to work well, they need structured, bite-sized content along with metadata. Content should be delivered through an API to allow consumption across devices and channels. With the right structured content and delivery method, chatbots and voice assistants have potential to be more useful.

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Hey, Turing: Are Chatbots and Voice Assistants Ready for
Prime Time in Today’s Experience Economy?
Chad Dybdahl | Solutions Consultant, Adobe

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About Alan Turing
• British mathematician, computer scientist, etc.
• Widely recognized for his codebreaking efforts during WWII
• Treated rather badly by his own government
• Coined the idea of the “Turing Test”
• Fundamentally:
• A machine is designed to interact intelligently
• A human interacts with the machine
• If the human cannot reliably distinguish the machine from a
human, it passes the test!
• “The Imitation Game,” 2014

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Voice assistants
 You probably have one in your pocket right now
 Amazon Alexa, Hey Google, Siri
 Unlikely to pass the Turing Test!
 Home automation…
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Chatbots
 Not as ubiquitous, obviously
 Not exactly household names
 But have you interacted with one lately?
 STORY: Getting fiber internet installed…
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Some statistics
 Today, 20% of all searches are voice-based (source: Google)
 By 2020, nearly a third of web browsing will be done without a screen (source:
Gartner)
 That’s a month from now!
 Voice accuracy rates now exceed 90%
 Tell that to my Google Home devices
 Clearly, not a segment to be ignored
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Chatbots: Care and Feeding
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• No, not like in The Matrix
• …where humans were batteries for machines
• But humans DO provide the food chatbots need
• We create the data a chatbot needs to function

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It starts with your content strategy
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• And the user experience
• Monolithic documents cause indigestion
• Chatbot responses need to be an answer
to a question
• Not a phonebook!

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What do chatbots like to eat?
 Bite-sized chunks of information (byte-sized?)
 Structured content is especially tasty
 Semantics are huge
 Fortified with metadata and keywords
 Sounds like DITA to me!
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Essential ingredient – good content
 Structured content
 Bite-sized chunks
 Keywords
 “Intents”
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Essential ingredient -- metadata
 What product or service are we talking about?
 Is location important?
 What is the user’s role?
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Essential ingredients – repository
 “Content as a service”
 Consume content:
 Any device
 Any place
 Any time
 API-based or “headless” delivery
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Off with their heads!
 Headless content delivery
 One source, many deliverables:
 PDF
 Responsive web
 Wearables
 Apps
 Chatbots
 Voice assistants
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So, if we…
 Create structured content
 Add a pinch of metadata
 Bake it in an API-enabled repository at 350 degrees…
 The robots can eat it
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Not set up to do a demo during the session
 But we’ll take a look at a simple example
 Please visit us at the Adobe booth to learn more!
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Thinking about this topic again
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If we “wire up” a simple chatbot
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And ask a question…
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But maybe the content changes…
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And we can deliver it in real time.
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So, about that test…
 Does this chatbot pass the Turing test?
 Repetitive answers
 Who types up an ordered list that fast?
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Do we want it to?
 You say repetitive, I say consistent
 Tricking our users?
 Technical content != marketing content
 Different styles
 Different objectives
 Just the facts
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About the speaker
Chad Dybdahl is a Solutions Consultant with Adobe Technical
Communications.
Mail: dybdahl@adobe.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chad-dybdahl/
Twitter: @cdybdahl
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