Chatbot-building platform before the LLMs
Website
Timeline
September 2016 - December 2020
Type
Product design, UI/UX, AI software development
Country
United States
Industry
AI
Back in 2016, way before the popularization of Large Language Models, 10Clouds aided Xuchen Yao, PhD and Guoguo Chen, PhD from KITT.AI in crafting a groundbreaking chatbot-building platform. Our goal was to place human conversation at the center of AI bot development.
ChatFlow, the tool we helped design, focused on creating conversational flows rather than on the complexities of programming the logic. The platform enabled applying chatbots into multiple popular applications and was eventually acquired by Baidu. Here goes the full story of our success.
Services
Technologies
Our Mission
We were recommended to Xuchen Yao and Guoguo Chen, Seattle-based AI scientists with a vision to revolutionize chatbot interaction, to augment their internal development project. ChatFlow, a brainchild of these efforts, hinged on the concept that designing conversational flows mattered more than the intricacies of coding the logic – a theory putting human conversation at the center of AI bot development.
With the collaborative proficiency of Xuchen leading the algorithmic charge, 10Clouds was tasked with providing the design expertise and product development proficiency needed to bring ChatFlow’s innovative bot-building platform to life. Our partnership was forged on a bedrock of innovation, with 10Clouds team injecting life into concepts with user-friendly design and robust development methodologies. A successful cloud-based software for natural language processing and speech recognition came into being.
"The launched speech recognition software now has thousands of users, which is attributed to 10Clouds’ work. Their expertise, creativity, discipline, and efficiency have led to more projects."
Challenge
How to craft human-like bot conversations when the LLMs are not around yet? How to make customers love your product's internal messaging app without disrupting their conversations?
Our objective was clear – to develop a solution that could enable any company to create conversational bots that mirrored how humans naturally design dialogues.
Confronted with the dual challenge of ensuring scalability and creating an intuitive user interface, 10Clouds was poised to tackle these demands head-on, thereby ensuring that ChatFlow's foundation was a step forward in universal chatbot adoption. To make the bot-making process as low-code a task as possible for the clients, we provided a whiteboard intefrace, where blocks of the conversational flow could be sequenced.
Initially, 10Clouds were hired for two different projects: speech recognition and natural language processing.
"Together, we completed two small projects and continued working on two bigger ones. Initially, we would write the core artificial intelligence algorithms and leave the rest to 10Clouds. They helped us with UX/UI design, code development, continuous integration and deployment, launching, and maintenance. We also determined the best developers and stack, wrote user stories, ran sprints, and measured productivity."
All of the solutions had to be hosted on AWS and be reliable, intuitive, and easy to maintain.
Business impact
ChatFlow saw a deployment that had attracted thousands of end-users, indicating the platform’s ease of use and robustness. The simplicity of design and power of functionality became a winning combination, allowing ChatFlow to evolve into a tool where the design dictated functionality, and algorithms served the flow, not the other way around.
Chatflow's remarkable journey from a nascent AI idea to a sought-after conversational design platform culminated in its acquisition by Baidu, marking not only a successful exit but a landmark validation of 10Clouds' ability to engineer market-transforming products.
Our engagement symbolized a synergy that transcended traditional client-service provider dynamics and ventured into the realm of shared growth and learning experiences. This only fueled the expansion of the partnership into more advanced and challenging projects, with 10Clouds continuing to be KITT.AI's partner in forging technological breakthroughs.
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