Isabella Updated on Dec 20, 2023 Filed to: AI Insights
Ten years ago, when users spoke with a customer representative on text chat, they were likely speaking with a human agent. Now the matter is a toss-up: They may be still speaking with a person in a call center somewhere, or increasingly in many cases, a chatbot.
Forward-thinking companies are embracing chatbots because they scale up customer-facing operations, standardize processes, and reduce costs. With these benefits in mind, one question remains: How do you use chatbots?
The earliest chatbots followed rule-based programming. If the user asked about A, the chatbot would respond with B. This simplicity led to often humorous results when the chatbot failed to deduce the subtlety of context.
Chatbots have evolved rapidly since those days. Now powered by artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other cutting-edge technologies, these chatbots can reasonably simulate human conversation. Many have even passed the Turing test, which means they are indistinguishable to users from other humans. Examples of popular chatbots include OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, both of which are driven by generative AI.
Due to this sophistication, chatbots can serve a variety of functions, including customer support, virtual assistance, and other forms of knowledge work. To make the most out of chatbots, users must understand their capabilities and limitations, how to use chatbot, how to communicate with them, and what input to include in their prompts. With this knowledge, users can maximize their relationship with these conversational agents.
Part 2: How to use OpenAI Chatbot?
Step1:Sign up for an account and log in - To begin using ChatGPT, visit chat.OpenAi.com and sign up with your email address, Google account, or Microsoft account. ChatGPT is available to users free of charge, though there is also a paid subscription with premium features, such as faster response times, at US$20.00 per month. New users will be required to verify their accounts with a valid phone number.
Step2:Access ChatGPT - After successfully confirming your account, individuals may use the chatbot by proceeding to log in via any web browser, such as Google Chrome or Firefox, or via ChatGPT’s official application for iOS or Android. Familiarize yourself with the ChatGPT interface, which contains the user’s account information, chat history, and most importantly, the text area for user input. In this space, users can ask a question to ChatGPT.
Step3:Create a prompt - While users can write in any way they wish and ChatGPT will generally understand, it is best to craft prompts clearly and concisely. This field is known as prompt engineering: It seeks to optimize the usefulness of language models like ChatGPT through better-written questions and instructions.
Step4: After the user poses their question, ChatGPT will take a moment to compose a reply. This time may take longer, depending on how many users are engaging with ChatGPT at a given moment. In rare cases, ChatGPT will experience an error or ask the user to return later when it is not overloaded with user demand.
Step5:Start a conversation - In the context of chatbots and language models, “conversation” does not literally refer to an aimless back-and-forth dialogue as a person would have with a friend. The user’s follow-up instructions or questions are usually designed to refine, fine-tune, or expand the output. For example, perhaps the user may want the generated text written in a slightly different style.
In some cases, multiple prompts are necessary to get the required response. This is known as few shot prompting, wherein users provide a selection of examples of what it wants the chatbot to do, before asking them for a desired output. For instance, the user may give code snippets with portions left blank, before asking the chatbot to generate similar examples. ChatGPT offers a wide range of functionalities that can assist users in accomplishing diverse tasks and obtaining the desired output through careful prompt engineering.
Part 3: How to use Microsoft's Bing AI chatbot?
Step1:Open (or download) Microsoft Edge and go to Bing - You may be wondering, “How to use AI chatbot such as Bing Chat?” To do so, launch the Microsoft Edge web browser. In case you don't have Edge, you can easily download it for Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. Additionally, the browser is also accessible on mobile devices, offering a native application on both Android and iOS platforms.
Step2: Once you have opened Microsoft Edge, navigate to bing.com. There are a few ways to access Bing Chat from here. Users can either click on "Chat" at the top of the screen, select the Bing logo located on the right-hand sidebar, or if available, click on options like "Try it" or "Learn more" positioned below the search bar. These options will lead users to the Bing Chat interface, where they can then ask their queries.
Step 3:Log in to your Microsoft account - Even if users are not logged in to a Microsoft account, they can still use the Bing AI chatbot. The caveat is that they are limited to receiving only five responses from the chatbot per conversation. If users want up to 20 responses per conversation from Bing AI, they will need to log into their Microsoft account.
Step 4: A Microsoft account can be created using an email address, such as one from outlook.com or OneDrive login. Users can utilize email addresses from competitive technology companies such as Gmail or Yahoo to create a Microsoft account to access extended conversations with the Bing AI chatbot.
Step 5:Learn how Bing Chat works - While Bing AI may be powered by ChatGPT ( Microsoft is an investor in OpenAI), the two interfaces offer distinct experiences. On Bing AI, users have the option to select a conversation style based on their preferences, such as creative, balanced, or precise. Creativity will offer more free-wheeling answers, precise will strive for accuracy, and balanced will give answers between those two extremes. In this way, users can choose the response manner they want for their answers.
Step 6:Start prompting - To utilize Bing Chat, you can start by entering your prompts and questions in the text area within the chat window. Once you have typed your input, simply press the enter key to submit them and initiate the conversation with the Bing AI chatbot. Bing AI will then provide answers that include reference links, which users can access for more information as they would with any search result. This ability is a marked departure to ChatGPT, which is not connected to the broader internet.
Part 4: Chatbot uses cases in our life
There are many cases where AI chatbots and language models can be helpful for both consumers and businesses.
Personal
Entertainment - These solutions can make recommendations on different media, such as books to read, movies to watch, or shows to binge. They can also offer more detailed information, such as the schedule for movie screenings. When connected to third-party solutions, they can also assist in booking tickets to specific events. For example ChatGPT, it can help you how to process getting a ticket for an event like getting a movie ticket from your preferred location.
Some people use chatbots directly for entertainment, chatting with them as they would a frind. Even if they know that the chatbot is not a real person, there are emotional benefits to harmless chatting in this way.
Personal assistants - Many professionals outsource virtual assistants from other countries, but there are ethical concerns when doing so, such as wage discrepancies and privacy risks. Chatbots may offer a better way forward since there is no wage arbitrage involved and they cannot disclose personal information.
As personal assistants, chatbots can perform most of the functions that human virtual assistants can do. These simple tasks include everything from market research to email management to content creation. Users who have tapped these language models as their virtual assistants have reported higher overall productivity.
Education - Language models have been a hotbed of criticism in academe, inviting scrutiny on how they may be used for flagrant cheating. Students, for instance, may simply copy and paste answers from ChatGPT to plagiarize a required essay. While these edge cases may certainly occur, there are many legitimate and productive use cases for these language models.
Students may use these chatbots as a starting point for further inquiry or research by jointly brainstorming with them. Students may also use these solutions to more easily check mistakes in their calculations, so they can pinpoint what they are doing wrong and correct the issue going forward. They may also ask these language models for help in preparing for exams, such as by asking sample test questions.
Business
There are many cutting-edge applications of chatbots in business. Most of the use cases fall into three major categories, where they offer benefits to both organizations and their customers.
Customer support - Consumers live in an on-demand economy. When they want to buy something, they expect to be able to do so now. When they need a question answered, they similarly expect an answer now. With human agents, there is a limit to how many customers can be served at a given time. The use of chatbots, however, removes this restriction, enabling companies to scale their customer support to whoever needs it.
For instance, Best Buy, an electronics retailer, offers an SMS customer support bot. A user simply navigates to its website, gets the relevant phone number, and sends an SMS message with their question. SMS customer support bot that allows users to send questions via SMS and receive prompt assistance. With consumers spending considerable time on their devices, implementing these chatbots aids not only them but businesses. Organizations alleviate the operational strain present with human agents, provide improved after-sales support, and improve the customer experience.
Marketing - Chatbots can assist across most marketing workflows. Marketing teams can leverage these solutions to help in generating unique concepts for campaigns, promotions, and other offerings. These chatbots can even help with execution, producing the required copy for all the necessary collaterals. For a public contest, the chatbot can write the mechanics, the social media promotions, and even the announcement of winners.
Most of these use cases will be obvious to anyone who has used these solutions. Lesser known is the fact that these chatbots can also aid in optimizing marketing operations through data analytics. Marketing teams can share relevant data with these chatbots, which can then suggest how to tweak a campaign for better results or what to pursue between two options.
Sales - When serving as customer support, chatbots are not limited to troubleshooting problems. They can also facilitate purchase decisions, such as customers who have questions about a product or service. For example, booking.com employs a chatbot to help users find apartments or accommodations based on specific location keywords. Such chatbots can also upsell by promoting special offers.
These chatbots enable businesses to operate around the clock, allowing customers to place orders without physically visiting a store. For example, H&M, a renowned fashion retailer, utilizes a chatbot to assist customers in finding products that match their preferences, providing a seamless shopping experience with personalized recommendations. In this way, businesses drive revenue without incurring additional overhead from expanding brick-and-mortar operations.
Both ChatGPT and Bing AI offer basic options for the free use of their respective chatbots. For ChatGPT, users can visit the OpenAI website (chat.openai.com) and create an account to access it for free. Should users need better performance, such as availability during peak hours, they may consider upgrading their free account to a paid subscription.
Users interested in Bing AI can visit the Bing website (bing.com) or use the Microsoft Edge browser. Users can enter queries and interact with Bing AI's conversational interface without any cost.
Part 6: Tips: How to write prompt & prompt examples
When writing prompts on ChatGPT, there are many best practices that users can follow to enhance the quality of the response.
1. Start with an action word. This is a common piece of advice for the bullet points on a resume, and it works just as well with prompt engineering. By starting with an action word, such as “write,” “produce,” or “conceptualize,” the model will have a clear idea of what action it is the user wants to be done.
Example: “Produce code that…”
2. Incorporate the web. While ChatGPT is not connected to the web as of this writing, there are workarounds to this limitation. Users can install the WebChatGPT plugin, which allows users to enrich their interactions by incorporating web results, ensuring a more comprehensive and precise response than one based purely on its training data.
Example: “Use WebChatGPT to generate a comprehensive explanation of…”
3. Include a peg. The easiest way for users to illustrate what they want is to include an example. If the user is looking for all state capitals that begin with the letter “A,” the user can mention “Atlanta” as a way of illustration. This best practice is all the more important for more complex questions. Providing a sample question-and-answer pair will go a long way toward getting the model to produce the responses that the user may be looking for.
Example: “Name all the birds that do not fly, like the ostrich…”
4. Provide context for the query. Establishing the rationale for asking a query may help the model provide more useful information relevant to the user’s situation.
Example: Instead of asking the vague, "How do you swim?" the user can provide context by specifying, “As someone new to swimming who wants to eventually join triathlons, I am eager to learn. Provide a guide on what I need to do to learn swimming with proper form.”
5. Include any specifications. If users do not indicate a desired word count or length, ChatGPT will write until it feels it is done. This may produce responses that fall outside of what the user needs: It may either be too short and superficial, or unnecessarily long. To ensure that the generated content provides exactly what the user needs, they should always stipulate the desired length of the content. The best way to do this is by indicating a word count.
Example: "Write a summary of this article in approximately 200 words."
Following these tips will provide users with a great starting point in improving their skill at prompt engineering, and in turn, the quality of the responses they receive.
FAQs about how to use a chatbot
How to save chatbot conversations for later use?
To save a chatbot conversation for later use in ChatGPT, there are two options.
Access past conversations on the ChatGPT interface - Past conversations are saved on the left side of the screen. Since conversations are saved in this way by default, users do not need to turn on any feature. Users can simply look through this list to locate the necessary conversation and even pick up from where they last left off.
Export as HTML file - If users want access to their conversations outside the ChatGPT ecosystem, there is a method to do so. At the bottom of the ChatGPT interface, click on the ellipses icon and select the "Export" option. Once exported, it will automatically be saved as an HTML file.
By utilizing these methods, users can conveniently save and retrieve their chatbot conversations on or off ChatGPT, ensuring easy access to previous interactions whenever needed.
Does ChatGPT/Bing AI use real-time data and current events?
ChatGPT's knowledge of events after 2021 was once limited due to its training data. It is now being updated with real-time data from Bing, which has been developed by Microsoft as a search engine capable of crawling the internet to retrieve relevant information. With this update, users can get up-to-date responses on current news, events, and happenings.
What is chatbot marketing?
Chatbot marketing refers to the use of chatbots and generative AI models to automate interactions with customers and potential customers. The aim here is to generate sales, improve retention, and even increase upsells and cross-sells. Chatbot marketing can be implicated on any digital touchpoint, such as websites or applications, where the chatbot can engage with users, provide information, answer queries, and ultimately, facilitate sales.
What is an API chatbot?
An application programming interface (API) is a tool that enables businesses to link their digital products or messaging channels with chatbot software and capabilities. In this way, APIs allow for greater engagement with customers across different websites and platforms, providing enhanced interaction opportunities. One of the most powerful APIs for generative AI is Open AI’s API, which is used by such tech giants as Snap, Shopify, Instacart, and Salesforce.
Conclusion
Chatbots like ChatInsight will change how people live their lives and how organizations conduct business. As with any tool, these solutions need to be mastered. Users need to master prompt engineering to draw out the best responses, and businesses need to devise innovative implementations of the technology. Through excellence in this sector, customers will be able to enjoy what they always dreamed of: high touch, highly personalized interaction from all their favorite brands.
Isabella has been working in the AI field for over 5 years. With a background in computer science and a passion for exploring the potential of AI, she has dedicated her career to writing insightful articles about the latest advancements in AI technology.
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