Some of the best inventions seem absurdly obvious once they appear on the scene. Think about the wheel. Did it really take a genius to come up with that idea? Apparently so. While we’re not comparing Microsoft’s recent announcement of Bing Business Bots to the invention of the wheel, the idea seems so much like a no-brainer that it must contain an element of brilliance.

Bing, Microsoft’s flagship search engine, already knows a lot about small businesses. Restaurants in particular often have a rich set of attributes available in Bing. Restaurant owners enter data such as location, hours of operation, type of cuisine, and even menu favorites.

Microsoft already has a full suite of natural language understanding, artificial intelligence, and bot building tools. It doesn’t seem to require a huge stretch of the imagination for someone to say: “Hey, let’s take all the data we have about restaurants and combine that with all our great tools and come up with a way to automatically generate chatbots. That way we can help all those restaurant people that are too busy creating great food and wonderful experiences to keep answering the phone to tell people that, yes, they’re open right now.”

Someone at Microsoft apparently said just that. Once Bing Business Bots are released, anyone who looks up a restaurant’s profile on Bing Places will see a “Chat” button. The button immediately connects hungry folks to an automated chatbot that can answer FAQs based on the business’s profile info. Users can access the bot on their desktop or mobile device, and according to a promotional video from Microsoft that Business Bot service is available on Bing, Skype, and even the restaurant’s own website.

Obviously a chatbot with very limited knowledge about the business will lose its usefulness quickly once the novelty wears off. Microsoft therefore intends to have the chatbot funnel data to the restaurant owner. That way if customers are often asking the same question that’s not being answered, the owner can script a response. Microsoft also promises restaurant owners analytics that show how the chatbot is being used and what customers are asking about most often.

Giving small businesses the power of intelligence assistance is a big deal. Providing them with this capability for free and by automatically applying NLU and AI tools to data that’s already been provided is an even greater service. Microsoft definitely seems to be on the right track with its AI First approach and the Bing Business Bot is a great example of providing the value of AI to its customers.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles

Tags: Microsoft, Bing, AI, intelligent Assistants, Bots, chatbots