In recent years, chatbots have become increasingly common providing customers with instant responses to their queries on a wide range of topics. However, most chatbots are only capable of providing basic information or following pre-programmed scripts. The Office Shock Book Chatbot is a new type of chatbot that combines advanced AI technology with a retrieval system to provide users with accurate and relevant information about the Office Shock book. We created the chatbot in partnership with Jeremy Kirshbaum of Handshake, as part of our continuing research and exploration into the future of communication and work.
The Office Shock Book Chatbot was created using a combination of GPT-3 and a retrieval system. This allows the bot to search for parts of the book that are relevant to the question being asked and then put that part of the book directly into the prompt on the backend. The retrieval system ensures that the bot is always accurate and reliable, as it only provides information that is directly related to the book.
The chatbot was specifically designed for the Office Shock book, which is a recent publication. This is important because a normal text generator like GPT-3 would not have the necessary information to accurately answer questions about the book. However, because the Office Shock book is a recent publication, the bot has been able to incorporate its content into its database and can therefore provide accurate and relevant information about it.
The Office Shock Book Chatbot is an experiment in the future of interactive book formats and knowledge. It is not intended to replace reading the book, but rather to provide a fun and interesting way to get a taste of what's in the book. The bot includes many of the concepts that are in the book and is embedded with a lot of the knowledge contained within it.
Looking to the future, it's likely that all knowledge will include some kind of interactive format. This version is useful and interesting, but it is just the first, awkward step. The tooling for creating custom chatbot systems is rapidly advancing, and in a matter of months, almost everyone will have some kind of custom chatbot based on generative AI. The field is headed towards making chatbots more interesting and robust, with the possibility of creating bots that know about many different books and topics.
There are deliberate limitations to the Office Shock Book Chatbot; it is intentionally designed to be conservative in its responses. It will only provide information that is directly related to the book and won't speculate on topics outside of its domain. This is a trade-off between spontaneity and accuracy, but it ensures that the bot is more reliable and trustworthy. However, it will sometimes give answers that the authors wouldn’t agree with. At this point, we are just as interested in the failures as the successes as the bot. We’re hoping this will stimulate conversations about the power and limitations of future tools like this one.
If you’d like to play with the chatbot yourself, check it out at https://officeshock.ai. Please share your experiments with us! If you find it interesting, you should also check out the Office Shock book at https://officeshock.org.