The business for chatbots is heating up. Motion AI, a start-up with only a product prototype, recently raised $700,000 in venture funding to build out their chatbot platform for businesses. By billing its service as an artificially intelligent chatbot, Motion AI seems intent upon disrupting more-established companies in the virtual assistant space that offer similar customer self-service solutions.

According to an article in the Chicago Tribune, investors were impressed with Motion AI’s David Nelson, the 22-year old founder, based on his previous start-up track record. Nelson created his first business at 15 and most recently operated FanRx, a company that managed social media for clients from the entertainment industry.

Nelson seems to be targeting the Motion AI chatbot service to businesses that could benefit from automating certain routine interactions with their customers. What sets the Motion AI approach apart from other similar services is their concept of the storyboard. The Motion AI user interface provides an easy, straightforward way for business owners to map out the basic steps in any repeatable transaction.

Motion AI uses the pizza ordering process to demonstrate the storyboard concept. The four basic modules of the pizza ordering storyboard are:

• Greet customer
• Ask if the order is delivery or eat in
• Take the order
• Confirm the payment

Within each module, further actions for the bot can be defined. If the customer says they want the pizza delivered, for example, the bot needs to ask for their address. If they want to eat in, the bot should ask for their name.

Nelson’s vision for Motion AI is to provide a service that “will allow users to build, train and deploy AI robots to do almost anything imaginable – from taking food orders and accepting payments, to running customer service chats and diagnosing patients.”

This makes it sound as if Nelson is positioning Motion AI to take on the likes of existing well-established vendors in the intelligent assistance space and cognitive computing giants like IBM’s Watson platform. It’s not clear what specific natural language processing or machine learning technology underlies Motion AI’s storyboard concept. The term storyboard may be new in this context. But the approach of using a process orchestration platform as a framework for defining an intelligent assistant’s action has been around for a while.

Motion AI in Action
I tried out the demo service for ordering a pizza. Some aspects of the bot-assisted ordering process went well. The bot got my address for delivery and then asked what size pizza I’d like. It listed out all the different options for toppings. It could also tell me the price for the pizzas and each topping. For someone who knows what they want and doesn’t change their mind, the demo script works well.

The Motion AI demo bot doesn’t yet have the ability to deal with the gnarlier aspects of the human customer. While reviewing the choice of toppings, I asked if they had bacon. The bot thought I wanted bacon and expeditiously added it to my order. When I tried to get the bacon removed, it didn’t work. When I tried to restate my order, the bot added another pizza to my order. At that point, the bot would need to give the customer the ability to escalate to a human to get things sorted out.

How will Motion AI position itself in the marketplace once their product is ready for launch? That remains to be seen. With the obvious interest in artificial intelligence and automated customer assistant services, it will be interesting to observe how the intelligent assistant vendor landscape evolves in 2016.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles

Tags: Artificial Intelligence, intelligent Assistants, chatbot