Ally Chatbot

• 

  logo

• 

  woman at work

Inspiration

Women face unique challenges when it comes to negotiating, beginning with the fact that we are often viewed as “unlikable” when we do it. Women also have a tendency to underestimate their professional value, and we have been socialized to avoid too much confidence, an essential quality for a successful negotiation. These obstacles make negotiating more difficult, but no less important — which is why you’ve got to be extra prepared. 

At the same time, significant disparity in how men and women are paid still remains. Women still make only $0.79 for every dollar men make in 2019. So how can we counteract these effects?

What it does

Ally Chatbot is a conversational chatbot that helps women in the workplace environment with advice on how to ask for a pay rise, how to manage difficult conversations, how to deal with workload and how to address sensitive topics.

For now, I have built the Ask for a raise feature, which guides women on a few simple steps that can help them practice a future negotiation for a higher salary.

How I built it

I have built it with Chatfuel.

Challenges I ran into

Although Chatfuel makes it easy to create an automated conversational experience for Facebook Messenger, training Ally to be responsive to free-form user messages is much harder. The chatbot only follows a script which is trained with, but in the future I plan on adding NLP in order to increase its accuracy, understand the intent and context of a user’s message.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Being able to build Ally by myself, in a very short amount of time, with no coding knowledge, for a cause that's very close to my heart, and that's equality in the workplace.

What I learned

I learned that chatbots like Ally are useful in sensitive conversations (practicing a difficult dialogue, tips & tricks on how to successfully negotiate or win an argument, practicing an interview). And that I can piggyback on self-help books, which can be distilled into short tips and tricks (e.g.: "Getting to Yes" by Roger Fisher for negotiating an agreement)

What's next for Ally Chatbot

I plan on:

1. perfecting the salary negotiation technique, so that it works seamlessly, no matter the input from the user;

2. adding more topics that Ally can help with, such as: interview tips & tricks and practice for when you're going through a career change or returning to work after maternity leave;

3. the possibility to send notifications to a user, such as daily tips on how to have a productive day, or daily check-ups on how the user feels at work, if they feel good, or overwhelmed/ disengaged.

4. maybe the possibility of enrolling humans to act as coaches in the platform, so that a user can get redirected to a human when its case surpasses the advice Ally can give.

5. building a salary database, based on inputs from users, which can be used as benchmarks in dialogues, so that more information becomes available about salary practices. (e.g.: "Did you know the average salary for a product manager in your position is $81,339.00?")

Built With

• chatfuel