Talkabot Talks: Rachel Law, Co-founder & CEO of Kip
This post originally appeared on the the Howdy.ai company blog to promote the Talkabot Conference
*Rachel and the team over at Kip are tackling the problem of coordinating office purchases on Slack, and now for the home over on Facebook Messenger. As a featured speaker at Talkabot this month, we asked her a little about how Kip can help both the office and the home, and ways we can use bots to streamline repetitive but essential tasks.*
How does Kip streamline a complicated workplace tasks like ordering supplies?
Instead of having the office manager go around and collect each team member’s order individually aka. “waitressing”, Kip can simultaneously ping each team member, ask for what they need, add the item to an office cart and send the item checklist and single checkout link to the office manager for approval.
What’s happening now is that we’ve moved from outsourcing entertainment (..) to outsourcing productive tasks that can be easily piecemealed out to bots.
What potential do you see for Bots to help teams automate essential tasks?
If you consider the history of bots, we’ve always had “computer player/P2” in most video games — — — which is what people are most familiar with in terms of AI + bots. I think what’s happening now is that we’ve moved from outsourcing entertainment (playing poker vs a bot) to outsourcing productive tasks that can be easily piecemealed out to bots.
The best potentials will be where a clearly defined task is laid out, and it is too expensive (in terms of time or money) sporadic for a human to carry out.
*What has been the reaction from your non-traditional approaches to
search like using photos and emojis?*
Most of our users, especially younger demographic really love it! It provides a surprising and fun way to shop, especially since you can combine and modify emojis to create new results. The other thing to remember is that conversation has changed along with the English language.
A decade ago only a few would use “lol” in a sentence, now it’s so common that the Oxford dictionary has accepted this acronym as its own word. It seems non-traditional at first, but we feel that chat has to reflect the conversation style people have today.
The (..) thing to remember is that conversation has changed along with the English language.
Kip will soon be on Facebook Messenger, how do you think Kip can help friends and families?
I grew up in a single parent family, my mom was not only the sole breadwinner but also the main caretaker. Each day after work, she still had to come home and do more work: housework. She’ll organize the things we needed for school, and check for stuff we were running out of. Unlike an office, she couldn’t just hire another admin or receptionist to help out.
Over 54% of children in US today live in non traditional families with single parents, step parents, extended parents and etc in all shapes and sizes. We hope that Kip on Facebook Messenger can help share the responsibilities caretakers have in their families, friends and communities.
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