Ikea Chatbot

(This post is archived and may be outdated)

Today when I go to Ikea's website. I saw a button called "Ask Anna". It popup a windows when I clicked on it. It is a chat bot help service that let people type conversation in the text box and chat with the Ikea Help Center. This is not a real man but a chat bot that analysis the keywords in your sentence and then pick up a response to answer you.

This chat bot help service can be a good way to help people in the webpage. Especially when the structure of the website is complicated. People tends to ask the sales for help when they go to shopping. This chat bot may give similar shopping experience to customers and leave a good impression to them.

However, I was curious how well she will do. So I do some tests.

I typed "Where is tables?". Then the chat bot is so clever that show me the pages about tables and desks. It is a little bit surprise that she is not only answer me but also take me to the page I want to go.

Then I asked again in the US IKEA website: "show me stores in Japan please". This time she show me the global stores location page. She did well but she can do it better by showing only the Japan stores rather then all stores.

Then I asked a difficult question: "What do you think between Ulfert and Ikea?"

She answer me: "How is IKEA different from other furnishing stores? We offer a wide range, good design and function, and also low prices. That's our business idea."

~ T.T ~

Did the IKEA programmer put Ulfert or other brand in the chat database?

You may try asking Anna some other strange questions and post here if she answer something funny or strange.

Published on 2008-05-04 by Makzan. More articles like this: