Summary: <p class="p2">Chat – whether that term includes apps, interfaces or bots – remains a hot topic for marketers and entrepreneurs. Increasingly fueled with artificial intelligence and complex algorithms, customer-experience designers and strategists have been looking at Chat as a tool for brands to interact with their customers in a human way on a massive scale. Sometimes this chat interface works, many times it doesn’t. But the interest in the interface remains.</p> <p class="p2">In this show, PSFK founder & editor-in-chief Piers Fawkes talks to entrepreneurs and experts who have been exploring the power of chat. Peter Rojas works as a VC at Betaworks in San Francisco and has a lengthy experience studying the tech sector. He spoke to Peter first because he wanted to get an insider’s point of view on the best use of chat as an interface.</p> <p class="p2">Justin Holland is an entrepreneur who runs HealthJoy where he is exploring how chat augments the human experience to deliver better connections with health insurance companies. In the show, Justin talks about how the chat bot Joy works and the impact it has on the user experience.</p> <p class="p2">The advertising agency BBDO also explored how chat could be used to connect with people in the right moment. During the episoder, creative director Joyce Pedretti explains why her team built a Messenger chat bot called Ida that helps people connect to charities and support groups as they scroll through Facebook posts.</p> <p class="p2">But when is chat the best tool to use and where do we go from him? To round out the conversation, Piers spoke to Amber Case – a digital anthropologist – who has been studying people’s interaction with chat and AI technology.</p> <p class="p2">So hopefully, in this show, we’ve provided you some different perspectives of the chat interface, AI and bots. At the right time, right place it seems to be a terrific medium for brands and consumers to interact – but it seems that we also have to remember the user’s context and the technology’s limitations.</p> <p class="p2">Let’s see what happens next – keep reading and listening to PSFK.</p>
