Chatbase is a conversational AI platform that replaces the risky status quo approach with a data-driven one based on Google's world-class machine learning and search capabilities. The results include faster development (by up to 10x) of a more helpful and versatile virtual agent, and happier customers! Initially, Chatbase provided a free-to-use analytics service for measuring and optimizing any AI-powered chatbot. After analyzing hundreds of thousands of bots and billions of messages in the first 18 months of existence, Google had two revelations about how to help bot builders in a more impactful way: one, that customer service virtual agents would become the primary use case for the technology; and two, that using ML to glean insights from live-chat transcripts at scale would drastically shorten development time for those agents while creating a better consumer experience. With those lessons learned, Chatbase Virtual Agent Modeling (currently available via an EAP) was born.

One limitation of NLP tools today is that they don't always work for less popular languages. So, people needing to support those languages often need to scrape together an NLP solution on their own. Also, NLP tools can have intent "drift," meaning that as the number of intents a bot supports grows, misclassification of intents is more likely. This misunderstood-request problem is solvable but will take more time. A related problem is missed user requests where the NLP engine misses an opportunity to map a request to an existing intent. Chatbase is working on exposing both types of issues, regardless of the NLP engine used.

Chatbots have become what apps once were: shiny new must-have items that retailers and businesses are lining up to deploy. But when you start using any new media, be it an app, a website or a chatbot, you have to monitor its performance to make sure it's effective. For years, marketers have had analytics to monitor the effectiveness of websites, and businesses later adopted the same approach for apps. But what kind of metrics would work for chatbots? How can marketers tell if a bot is really helping customers consistently?

Just ahead of Google's I/O event kicking off later today, some details have leaked out about a new service that Google is launching for developers that are building chatbots. TechCrunch has learned that Google has developed a new service called Chatbase, which provides analytics and suggestions for how to "fix" bot experiences to make them better for users. A source tells us that the service is being hatched out of Google's Area 120 internal incubator, and it was developed by Ofer Ronen and Hari Rajagopalan, both of whom came to Google by way of previous acquisitions. Chatbase appears to have been in a private beta with about a dozen companies, including the chat app Viber (which launched its own foray into chatbots late last year), eBay, JustFab and Unicef. There are no screenshots on the Chatbase website, although there are options for developers to sign up for access, which leads me to think it might be one of the items getting announced today.

Google's chatbot analytics platform is now open to everyone, more than six months after its quiet debut during the company's I/O developer conference. Called Chatbase, it's intended to help developers better analyze and optimize their bots so they can improve conversion rates and accuracy -- and avoid having users feel bots are useless. Anyone can use Google's Chatbase for free, similar to Google Analytics, and it'll work across any platform, including Facebook Messenger, Kik, Slack, Viber, and Skype. But it's more than messaging services where Chatbase could prove invaluable: With the rise of voice assistants like Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, Samsung's Bixby, and Apple's Siri, understanding analytics will be important. A product of Google's Area 120 internal incubator, Chatbase currently has "hundreds" of companies using it, including Ticketmaster, HBO, and Viber.

At Google I/O this year, Google quietly introduced a new chatbot analytics platform called Chatbase, a project developed within the company's internal R&D incubator, Area 120. Today, that platform is being publicly launched to all, after testing with hundreds of early adopters including Ticketmaster, HBO, Keller Williams, Viber, and others. The idea behind Chatbase's cloud service is to offer tools to more easily analyze and optimize chatbots. This includes giving bot builders the ability to understand what works to increase customer conversions, improve the bot's accuracy, and create a better user experience. This data is available through an analytics dashboard, where developers can track specific metrics like active users, sessions, and user retention.