Sweden's Sinch Launches "AskFrank," a Different Kind of Chatbot

Today, more companies are relying on chatbots to engage with customers in an attempt to lower operating costs and improve customer service. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work out as intended and many of customers are becoming frustrated when the chatbot can’t provide them with the right answers or can’t recognize their query at all. This implies that chatbots need to change for the better in order to avoid driving customers away.

Swedish cloud communications and mobile customer engagement company Sinch AB this week announced that it’s launching AskFrank, its AI-enabled intelligent question-answering search engine. AskFrank was designed to integrate with a business’s existing customer engagement chatbots, contact center, website or knowledge base. Using AI to search content, it adds value to chatbots as an extension that provides answers to questions that are not available in a chatbot’s database by expanding its information access.

Named AskFrank because the answers it gives are frank, direct and honest, the new chatbot works differently from most chatbots. Instead of using keywords like other search engines, it searches content based on the subject and the meaning. This means that, even if the user does not know the right keywords to use, they can still find what they are looking for. By periodically analyzing content from Confluence, Sharepoint, FAQ pages and other knowledge bases, AskFrank can make vast quantities of data searchable by indexing it within its database, according to Sinch. So, whatever the question asked, AskFrank can look for the most appropriate answers by using state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms.

“In an economy where more and more organizations are relying on chatbots to engage with their customers to lower operating costs, we are seeing customers often frustrated in cases when a chatbot can’t provide them the right answer,” said Sunny Dhami, VP of product marketing for Sinch. “Therefore, Sinch built AskFrank to improve the level of accuracy and customer experience in customer communication. 

AskFrank improves any chatbot’s capability to understand natural language much better. As a result, it can improve the support customers and live agents receive. The result is an increase in customer service efficiency, with fewer customers needing to seek second and third layers of support. Instead, the received the information they seek the first time.

Edited by Erik Linask