Talking with ChatGPT over the phone is cool. But can we make it useful?

Everybody is talking about Open AI’s ChatGPT, at least among the tech people worldwide. It’s the first large language model chatbot to make a splash, and what a splash! It landed with the energy of the Chicxulub asteroid – the one that killed the dinosaurs 65 million-odd years ago in the Yucatan sea. That asteroid generated a mile-high tsunami, almost as high as ChatGPT. One should go slow with the metaphors though: are ChatGPT and its peers going t kill …[gasp]… us? I am an optimist and I don’t think so, but the jury is out according to much of the press.

In all cases, after using ChatGPT to write poems about pickleball or essays on Tibetan literature, the tech community is trying to understand what it can do for real business.

We at Interactive Media have integrated ChatGPT with PhoneMyBot, our service to provide voice channels to chatbots with a no-code, ready to roll approach. Through PhoneMyBot it is now possible to make a phone call to ChatGPT, ask questions and listen to its answers. This is still only a demo, but in the process we have developed some ideas on whether and how ChatGPT may work for what we do normally, which is providing tools to companies to service their customers.

Let’s say it immediately: without personalization, ChatGPT is not sufficient to implement a customer service voicebot. The domain is too wide: it is literally the whole Internet. This means that ChatGPT cannot use its normal language model to answer pointed questions on – say – your bank balance today.

It is also outdated: according to OpenAI, the version of ChatGPT using GPT-3.5 has limited knowledge of events that occurred after 2021. A new version based on GPT-4 has been released a few days ago, but as time goes by, and since the language model needs to be curated, which take time, very recent events will never be in ChatGPT knowledge base.

To be sure, in customer service there is sometimes a need for general-purpose conversation. In our experience, users sometimes go out on a tangent and ask bots all sorts of questions, for instance: where do you live? how old are you? can I see you? how much are you paid?… ChatGPT has certainly good answers for all these questions, and it would be useful in side conversations. ChatGPT is also language-independent: in essence it can tell what language a user is speaking and answer in the same language. This is a stunning capability and it makes it so much easier to use ChatGPT.

However, it is possible to “fine-tune” ChatGPT for specific domains, adding dozens, hundreds or thousands of examples of specialized prompt-completion pairs that define a separate domain, identified by its own name and id. This domain goes to augment the general-purpose model and allows the chatbot to answer pointed questions. At Interactive Media, we are experimenting with fine-tuning one of the available general purposes models and we’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

There’s another snag though, because to be useful you also need to access actual data related with people’s requests. ChatGPT of course does not perform the appropriate database queries into company databases or CRMs. But Interactive Media is well versed in this matter and can provide a real-time layer to authenticate securely into a company back-end, retrieve the appropriate information, and insert it into the ChatGPT answers. At least partly, this has to be done on a case-by-case basis, so call us to discuss!

Please go ahead and try PhoneMyBot’s connection with ChatGPT: contact Interactive Media at info@imnet.com or click the button below.