We Asked ChatGPT about Customer Support
Dec 1, 2022 | 5 mins
A stunning new development in conversational AI was just announced by a company called OpenAI - a project heavily funded by Microsoft. The company created a conversational AI that lets you converse on in-depth topics: ChatGPT.
This is a major step forward in conversational experience and customer engagement.
OpenAI
OpenAI is an open initiative to research and deploy artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity. They regularly release new updates and models. One famous example of an OpenAI model is the recent DALL·E 2, a successor of DALL·E that can create images from written text. It’s an impressive feat and one of the first of its kind. We actually used it to generate the image for this article.
What Is ChatGPT?
The new ChatGPT model is a sibling of their existing InstructGPT. ChatGPT is based on GPT·3.5 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), an AI model capable of explaining complex subjects like you would to a five-year-old child. This concept, made famous by Albert Einstein and now known as ELI5, is also a popular term on Reddit.
If you can't explain something to a six-year-old, you really don't understand it yourself.
Albert Einstein (Misattributed)
The model is impressive because in the examples some of the questions are not easy (on a scientific level) to answer. The answers are accurate and explained in a way that an average person can grasp the concept.
As impressive as it may sound, there is one common problem with newly trained AIs. Their answers sometimes seem like solid solutions, but turn out not to be realistic or feasible.
What Does This Mean for the Conversational and Customer Engagement Industry?
It’s not clear if this technology is ready for prime time and actual in-the-wild usage. We can imagine it will need more training in specific conversations with humans and answering intricate support questions. If done right, this AI may become a helpful addition to your Customer Engagement strategy.
Already, ChatGPT seems to better understand the context and conversational flow than its siblings and ancestors. Having an AI interact with this kind of natural conversational flow makes one wonder. Not if, but when will the Turing Test become a dated way to distinguish an AI conversation from human interaction? This holds especially true for initial contact and first-level support engagement.
So, when will we no longer be able to tell the difference between engaging with an AI versus a first-line customer support employee? The task of employees is usually to follow a directive script and anticipate the answers they receive from the customers. The moment an AI can take over these tasks and understand the answers provided by the client we will see a change in how customer support is being done.
ChatGPT’s Response to the Customer Engagement Industry
Who are we to not ask ChatGPT about its own opinion on the matter? We were so kind as to ask it for its own opinion on the matter, and here you’ll find ChatGPTs response. We asked how it would like to be called, to which its response was:
You may refer to me as Assistant, a large language model trained by OpenAI. I am not a human, but a machine learning model that has been trained to generate human-like responses to a wide range of questions. I do not have my own personal opinions or beliefs, and I only provide responses based on the information that has been provided to me.
ChatGPT in an interview by us
Without further ado
What’s Next?
It’s hard to say what’s next, the development of new models and provided input data and scenarios keeps growing. One thing that’s certain is that the speed of improvement grows exponentially. We could be looking at a drastic change in how companies implement cost-effective customer- support and engagement in the near future.
Nobody knows exactly where this will go, but given the goal of OpenAI, which is to have humanity benefit from the use of AI, we hope to see great things from ChatGPT.
If you have or use ChatGPT in your production environment, we’d love to know! Reach out to share your (anonymized) story!
