The First Truly Awesome Chatbot Is A Talking T. Rex - FC

insight

Children ask a lot of questions that their parents don’t always have the answers to.

IDEA

Tina the T. Rex is our first chatbot. Although she currently lives on the Facebook pages of National Geographic Kids in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, and at talktothetrex.com, Tina started life in January 2016 as an internal hack week project. Our hack weeks are ways for us to explore emerging technology and behavioural insights; in the case of Tina, we wanted to investigate natural language software, and the increasing potential of messaging platforms. So, in a week, we made a ‘talking’ T. Rex which people could write questions to, in plain sentences, and get a response from a limited scripted range. We called her Tina for the alliteration, and in tribute to our then-intern (Tina).

HOW

Writing a bot is quite different from writing an application. It requires ongoing training, testing and tweaking, so we developed a process of iterative writing and feedback that gave us the best results. Also, natural language systems require a lot of questions in order to train the systems to understand what people are asking.

We started by writing these ourselves, but eventually outsourced the job to workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, asking them to give us the top five questions they would like to ask a T. Rex. We (manually) sorted their answers by frequency, and came up with about 30 common questions that formed the core of Tina’s knowledge.

'The first truly awesome chatbot’ - Fast Company
There was a 6% uplift in subscriptions to the magazine and 2000% rise in Facebook page visitors.

Press: Digiday - Popular Science - Fast company