Peer to Peer Magazine

42 What's all the Chatter about Chatbots? B Y J A C K R E C I N T O Y ou'd be hard pressed to find someone who has not had any exposure to a chatbot. Nowadays anytime one visits a website for their bank, mobile device carrier, cable company, etc. they are greeted by a friendly popup introducing themselves as a "John" or a "Tracy" or a "Melanie" who is inquiring if they can be of service. Of course, we all know that the vast majority of the time, "Melanie" or whatever they call themselves is not a real person, but a chatbot. It's even more common to be living with a knowledge bot. Personally, I have grown quite accustomed to ask mine to "turn on the lights" in a room or "Play my playlist" while I clean the house. As this is a fast- growing trend, this year ILTA was exploring how legal was using chatbots. This exploration took multiple forms over the course the year, and culminated to the final crescendo of some ILTACON sessions. Although this was not the first year ILTANs have created content and had discussions regarding bots, it was interesting to see how some of the bots had not only been deployed, but were growing and evolving to do things their creators hadn't imagined when they were that first thought of in the mind of the designer. I had the honor of beginning this year's endeavor into the exploration of chatbots in legal with a podcast called "Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto: How Internal Chatbots can save time and increase productivity". In this podcast, I interviewed Mark Gerow, Director of Fenwick Labs who co-designed "FENNI", Fenwick & West's in-house developed knowledge bot. The difference between a knowledge bot and chatbot are that transactional chatbots are developed to handle a small number of processes which can replace questioning an expert or enhancing a user interface whereas a knowledge bot is designed to handle thousands of processes and constantly evolves to expand what it can do. "John", "Tracy" and "Melanie" as I mentioned above, are good examples of chatbots, and Siri, Alexa and Google are knowledge bots. Mark described how they designed FENNI and the challenges that he and his team faced in developing and deploying it as well as the reception of his colleagues at his firm. The podcast gave a good introduction into planning, maintaining and improving a knowledge bot, it was a good view into making the sausage and ensuring it was not only palatable but delicious enough for the users to keep coming back for more. Although the content was specifically designed for and tailored to law firms, the methods and principles could be universally applied to any organization looking to implement a bot for their own use. Shortly after my podcast with Mark, Jack Thompson of Sanofi interviewed, Chip Delaney of NexLP on the podcast "AI/ Chatbots and the AI Landscape: How You

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