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Maybe some context would help. Since I knew many of the folks visiting our website would assume our live chat was a chatbot, the initial message in our chat said "Hi, I'm Erica! I'm a real person, and one of the founders of [name of my company.] What questions can I answer for you today?"

I put that in there specifically to circumvent people asking if this was a bot.

The person who kept asking me to answer simple math questions had the context of this being the initial interaction. Furthermore, he didn't stop at asking once. He continued to repeatedly ask me to answer math questions, and when I asked him to please ask a question about our product or service, he would refuse and smirk about how I was obviously a bot because I refused to play his game.

It was this repeated questioning that turned it into harassment, from my perspective. And this single interaction was part of a pattern of harassment, both sexual and otherwise, that I've seen manning B2B SaaS chats.

I can also attest that men who've run the same live chats, at the same companies, with their avatars and real names do not get this sort of harassment at all. In fact, they have been shocked at the level of harassment received by simply having a female face and/or name.




> I put that in there specifically to circumvent people asking if this was a bot.

Nice idea, but nothing prevents one from writing a bot that starts conversation with "I'm a real person" so that people would type their questions to a cheap bot instead of demanding to speak to an expensive human. Thus not all people trust this. Plus of course not all people read anything that is written as a chat header, because the assume it is a boilerplate filler like "we value your feedback and eager to help you" blah blah, no relation to my actual question so I won't read it.

That of course presents a problem - how do you prove you're human if a bot could always be doing the same thing? I don't really know :)

And yes, chatbot designers frequently use pictures of attractively looking women to make the customer more likely to engage with a bot. Which trains the users in a predictable way, unfortunately.




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