The development team at Rulai, with offices in Beijing and Campbell, Calif., is helmed by the renowned University of California, Santa Cruz, computer science professor Yi Zhang.
Professor Zhang, the company’s chief technologist, and her team are launching a product that customer service managers can use to develop chatbots that will perform tasks based on customer conversations, and that can be created without a single line of code.
It’s an example of how software developers and artificial intelligence systems are writing themselves out of the application development process.
Specifically, the Rulai tool was designed for customer service managers. Using Rulai’s drop-down toolkit, managers can write scripts and create action items to customize chatbots that will perform functions based on their communications with customers.
In the demo I saw, Professor Zhang created a chatbot that could automatically respond to a customer and cancel and rebook their flights through a series of drop-down menus and an integration with a company’s back end.
The chatbots rely on natural language…