
Askite – is it time to get rid of FAQs? - aiaioolabs
The Wikipedia article on FAQs says:<p>&quot;The &#x27;FAQ&#x27; is an Internet textual tradition originating from the technical limitations of early mailing lists from NASA in the early 1980s. The acronym FAQ was developed between 1982 and 1985 by Eugene Miya of NASA for the SPACE mailing list.&quot;<p>Since 34 years have passed since 1982 we thought it was high time we gave FAQs an upgrade.<p>So, we developed Askite, a bot that helps you answer customers&#x27; questions better and learn about what your customers look for when making a purchasing decision.<p>Askite lets customers type questions into a text box to find an answer or a way to reach a human being.<p>Since Askite takes up very little space, it can be used as a contextual help tool that can be strategically located anywhere inside a web page.<p>The questions asked on Askite can help a seller find out why people do not purchase a product.<p>Let&#x27;s say a customer is looking to buy a whetstone (a knife sharpening stone).<p>They want to know how big the whetstone is, but the product information section lacks that detail.<p>In most online stores, the customer has to either take a chance on the product (and possibly return it) or move on.<p>Askite gives them a third option - to ask questions about the product, and hopefully obtain the information required to make a purchase.<p>Askite can be added to a website painlessly by pasting in an HTML snippet obtained from Askite (at http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.askite.com).<p>We&#x27;re looking for feedback and suggestions from everyone.<p>Don&#x27;t you think it is time to get rid of FAQs?
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onion2k
_Askite lets customers type questions into a text box to find an answer or a
way to reach a human being._

There's an assumption being made here that I believe would stop this working
for a lot of users - in order to ask a question the user needs to know enough
about their problem to phrase the question in a way that will result in a
useful answer. An FAQ has the advantage that the user can come to it with _no_
knowledge and still get value from it.

So. continuing your whetstone example, I would need to use the right language
to get the right information from Askite. If the seller has added details like
"The size of the stone is X by Y by Z" but I ask "What are the dimensions of
the stone?" then I don't get anything useful. If I could just read through the
seller's FAQs I would find what I'm looking for.

Lists of FAQs are very, very powerful, usable ways to access information.
They're not going way any time soon.

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aiaioolabs
That's a very good observation.

So, we have considered the discovery problem.

What we've done to make the discovery easier is that we've built in auto-
suggest capabilities.

So if the person starts to type "What are the " ... they will see "What is the
size ...".

The second thing is that we can in fact incorporate synonyms in the tool as
well (query expansion is a common way to handle it).

However, I will take away a good point you've made - that FAQs can be of use
to a customer with 0 knowledge and that they are very powerful.

I just hope that we can provide an equally powerful alternative, if only for
people with >0 knowledge (as they're likely to have if they're looking to buy
the product).

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sawanibade
An faq replacement will work if the customer could type his query in his
language (not knowing how it is written in faq) and yet get the correct
answer. I read your answer suggesting usage of synonyms. Well faq mining is a
classic information retrieval problem so you can potentially use the entire IR
tech here! Most enterprise bots today are basically faq miners(ask optus) or
order placement ones.

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aiaioolabs
Yes, multilingual support would be an interesting feature. In fact, what we're
trying to do is improve FAQs by using an FAQ mining system as the entry point
to the FAQ.

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Piskvorrr
Let's say a customer is looking to buy a whetstone. They type "Whetstone size"
into a search engine. A FAQ which was previously indexed comes up as a result.
Up until that point, no direct interaction with the product's webpage happens
at all. Where's your bot now?

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aiaioolabs
Thank you for the observation.

However, I have to point out that typing "Whetstone size" into a search engine
will return the sizes for arbitrary whetstones.

I was talking about the use case where a customer is on say Amazon and looking
at a specific whetstone.

Sometimes, the product descriptions are woefully inadequate.

The vendor, in such cases, ends up being unaware of the inadequacy because
(s)he has no way of learning what the customer is looking for.

If a system such as Askite were to be embedded in each Amazon product page,
customers would ask their questions right there, and at the very least, the
vendor would come to know about the problem.

So, Askite doesn't help in the discovery of a seller. It helps the seller
convert a customer once the customer has found the seller.

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Piskvorrr
Good points. Still, having the known answers discoverable (and indexable)
probably wouldn't hurt - bot and FAQ as mutually supporting tools, not one as
replacement of the other.

Is there, perhaps, a demo site to showcase what you have in mind?

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aiaioolabs
Yes, you're right. We wish to make them mutually supporting in future (so that
the SEO benefits of FAQs will be available to the website).

There is a demo available at [http://www.askite.com](http://www.askite.com).

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umakant3_14
Why do we need FAQs anyway, I thought, they were dead some 5 years ago on a
website. I guess we need a place to find information that we can't in a
website, but we have an information need to fulfil ?

