How to Make Your Chatbot More Human?

Vedran Kozić

Content Writer

⏱ Reading Time: 8 minutes

Chatbot development cornerstone was set way back in 1966 by Joseph Weizenbaum. Her name was ELIZA. The principles used in ELIZA, which was the first chatbot ever, were a foundation for the development structures of every modern chatbot we know today.

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Fast-forwarding 50+ years, we are witnessing the skyrocketing number of chatbots around the world. And while some of which live up to the modernized standards of natural language processing- NLP, others still follow simple principles that their ancestor ELIZA had.

Keywords, specific phrases, and preprogrammed answers are just some of them. However, modern society requires modern solutions. Customers want flawless experience while talking to your brand, and that’s a bit hard with conventional chatbots.

It is essential to develop a chatbot with a smile to stand out from the crowd! And by a smile, we are thinking of making a chatbot more human-like, with personality which will give it a sense of realness. In this blog post learn how to make a human-like chatbot that will be a true representative of your brand.

What Are Advanced and Human-Like Chatbots

Modern chatbots are advanced and contextual. Utilizing Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). It allows them to memorize conversations with users and to learn and improve over time. Unlike keyword recognition-based chatbots, they can self-improve. They can learn from what users are asking for and how they are asking it.

Take a contextual chatbot, for example, a contextual chatbot allows users to order pizza. It will store the data from your conversations, thus it will discover what users like to buy. The result is remembering the most common order, delivery address, and payment information. Rather than having to reply to several questions the user just has to answer with ‘Yes’ or “No” and pizza is on the way!

Example of chatbots like that is Siri. She can make jokes, give suggestions and assist you to perform certain actions. She can also compose a calendar assignment or place an order when you run out of food. Another one on the list is Amazon’s Alexa. She will notify you about the weather changes, stream news and music on demand and serve as a virtual assistant. She responds to voice commands to control home lighting and much more. There is a lot of similar ones such as Microsoft’s Cortana, Facebook’s M and the unreleased Viv.

However, just assistance is not enough. According to the case of Ellie, people tend to have an emotional connection with the interlocutor. Ellie is an AI psychologist that is essentially used to help military workers suffering from PTSD. She uses verbal and nonverbal cues and engages in a conversation. Interestingly enough patients that experienced talking with her, prefer talking to Ellie over a real person. People didn’t feel judged and were provided with more information. This is important because it shows what kind of assistance people feel comfortable talking with.

All things considered, there are a few ways to make your chatbot more human. By giving it character and personality you can make them seem more human-like. This will bring multiple benefits to your business, and it will help engage customers who prefer to have human assistance.

How to Develop a More Human-Like Chatbot

Chatbots Voice

Voice search has a growing role in peoples research for content. As reported by BrightLocal Study, its popularity is growing fast.

58% of consumers have used voice search for local business information within the last year
46% of users who use voice search look for a local business on a daily basis
27% of them visit the website of a local business after they’ve conducted a voice search

Voice search revolutionizes the way people look for the product, service, and information.

Simplicity and speed of voice search will take an even bigger role in searching for content. Take that in consideration when adjusting your marketing tools and integrate a smart voice chatbot.

Advanced bots such as Alexa, Siri, Cortana, and Google Assistant have in common natural-sounding voice. They don’t sound like robots, R2D2 or C3PO. They reply as a human would. Also, it has everything to do with their type of voice, the tone in which they speak and so on. From the way they construct sentences, understand information and reply, it’s all-natural and human-like.

For instance, Duolingo has developed voice chatbot that helps people learn a new language. They have noticed the hardest thing with learning language is practicing out loud, so they provide their customers work on spoken language.

Picture 1. Duolingo Chatbot

Chatbots Emotions

People usually favor conversing with someone who they can identify. It is fairly easy to look through the message exchange and feel a human connection. Even though it may not be a human on the other side, it feels better when it shows understanding and emotion.

Consequently, more than 80 percent of people say that they will keep doing business with a company that provides a positive user experience. You can do the same with chatbots which stimulate positive feelings.

This is where emotional API can help. Emotion Application Programming Interface (API) enables you to recognize emotions in images. Emotion detector uses facial expressions and returns them as a collection of sensations for each profile. It detects a wide variety of emotions like anger, shame, disgust, anxiety, joy, neutral, sorrow, and a genuine surprise. These emotions are perceived as cross-cultural and are universally expressed with particular facial expressions.

To get an image of facial expressions you can use TrackingJS. It analyzes a video and it works based on the tasks that we have given to it. It also watches for stuff like objects and colors. When chatbot notices and understands emotions, it can respond more friendly.

Chatbots Language

Same as voice and emotions, your chatbots language can make a huge difference. For some questions, there is only one way to reply and sometimes there are numerous ways to respond. That’s the reason why you need to provide a base of potential responses. If a chatbot keeps repeating the same message, after some time it becomes apparent that your interlocutor is not a human.

There is a wide variety of chatbots in specific industries that have language adjusted to their fields of work. For instance, Amiya is Dressipi’s fashion chatbot assistant that helps customers in their shopping journey. Fashion chatbots give customers suggested outfits along with size recommendations, in real-time. Their language uses enriched colors and fashion terms to get a better bond with a customer.

On the other hand, traveling chatbots can book flights, and aid you in integrating additional services from other platforms. One of such is American Express chatbot- Mezi. The language that Mezi typically uses is friendly and suggestive. It asks questions that might be relevant to you, such as “Any particular part of the city you would like to stay?”

Picture 2. Style Adviser by Dressipi

Chatbots Character

After giving your chatbot emotion, voice and language, it needs a personality. A chatbot is either a voice or text-based, but that shouldn’t change the way it communicates and responds on any of your platforms. Voice should always be in the same tone, including the same language and manners.

Just try to imagine chatbot like Siri changing her normal refined language by talking in jargon, kind of inappropriate, don’t you think. Chatbots should be adjusted to stay relevant to the target customer. Variety of perspectives, experiences, and abilities is crucial in developing a personality. A chatbot should be as similar to your target audience as possible. When creating its personality, find someone to represent the target user, then build your chatbot around it.

There are all kinds of tests and visual descriptions that can support you and your customers to determine what brand persona your chatbot should communicate.

Here’s one excellent example:

Picture 3. Chatbot Personas

These archetypes are just a starting point. You’ll still need to fill in the details of your brand persona.

When developing a chatbot based on an individual, knowing what their individual’s archetype is and what is their way to express that archetype, both in their written and spoken communications, can help you produce new content.

After the character had been chosen, choose the way it will deal with objections. Be sure, where there are sales, there are objections. A chatbot will be the one dealing with them, and there is a way a chatbot can be supported.

Chatbots Demographic Characteristics

The last thing is to provide your chatbot with some demographic features. First of all, a catchy name would help customers to easily remember their chatbot experience. That will help them feel like they are talking to someone who really understands and cares about their problems and needs.

Also, understand that content which is localized can be extremely effective in marketing. Further, you can give your chatbot even a place of living as well as favorite quotes and goals.

Conclusion

Considering there are many ways to personalize a chatbot, it is understandable that they will continue to act more human-like. Natural sounding voice is what encourages a customer to interact with your chatbot, and its personality and character make it more comfortable to relate to the customer’s problem and find a solution. After all, chatbot’s voice makes everything more practical and quicker.

It becomes obvious that with further development of platforms, chatbots will become a necessity. It will be hard to differentiate them from a real human. This is just one more reason why the personality of an AI is very important. It helps chatbots to stand out from the crowd and makes people want to explore it, rather than try to avoid it.