Implementing AI chatbot to answer live audience’s FAQs at events

Anybody who has organized an event, large or small, knows ‘there is always one’, and frequently more than one.

December 2, 2020

- 2 min read

Anybody who has organized an event, large or small, knows ‘there is always one’, and frequently more than one. You can’t name them, of course, especially if they are an important customer but this person feels they have the right to ask any question just because they can’t be bothered to read the emails or the briefing guide that you prepared for them.

So, what is the Canapii team’s most annoying question of all time? Well, they nearly always come from our colleagues (and if you are reading this, my friend, yes we are thinking of you) who think our only purpose is to serve them. The questions that annoy most are the simple ones “where’s lunch?”, “what time do I have to check-out?” or “which flight am I on?” We’re pretty sure a lot of event managers can relate to this. Agree?

Canapii’s first idea to improve this situation was to offer all our event managers some noise-canceling headphones so they can ignore their most annoying colleague, but then we figured that might not be good for business.
So, instead, we are offering Fero, your very own events chatbot. Fero is smart and quick to understand simple event questions. When Mr. Annoying Colleague asks the silly question, you can respond politely that they should ask Fero who offers a much more friendly interface than the traditional FAQ. Fero is a founding member of Canapii, so, of course, he understands and speaks many languages. Fero also knows all the sessions taking place during your conference, when and where they are, as well as every attendee and speaker too. He is our most popular colleague, and we are happy to share him with you.

I am sure you are now thinking: “I bet Fero is not that smart. I am sure I can find a question that he cannot answer”. And that’s true, we find he can normally answer eight out of 10 questions correctly and he is getting smarter every week. This success rate still means our much-loved collaborators in event organization need to answer 80% fewer questions than before Fero was born, which is pretty amazing. Even better, we use our chat functionality to escalate immediately to a human, for those 20% of questions that Fero can’t answer.

Fero is copied in on all the human-generated answers so he keeps learning; it is machine learning at its most useful.

gemma

Gemma Edwards

@GemmaLEdwards1
Co-Founder at Canapii

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