A chatbot that answers in Icelandic: what works and what does not

Chatbots have a bad reputation and they earned it. The old systems were built on fixed answers and hit a dead end the moment somebody asked something nobody had written a reply for.

What has changed is that modern language models actually understand the question, and they speak decent Icelandic. The problem is no longer comprehension, it is discipline: making sure the machine only says things that are true.

When a chatbot pays off

• You get the same ten questions every day: opening hours, prices, delivery, whether you serve a particular area.
• Enquiries come in outside working hours and people want an answer straight away.
• Your service is complicated enough that people do not know what to ask for.
• You want to know what people are really asking about, and the conversations show you that in black and white.

When it does not

• You get few enquiries and answer all of them yourself in a few minutes.
• The subject is sensitive or personal, for instance healthcare or legal work.
• You have no clear information to build on. A bot without facts is just a new problem.

The rules that make the difference

1. The bot may only answer from facts you have given it. No general knowledge, no guessing.
2. If the answer is not there it should say so and offer to connect the person to a human. This is the single most important rule.
3. Never invent prices, dates or promises. A wrong date in a chat is real damage.
4. A human should always be within reach, one click away.
5. Read the conversations weekly for the first few months. That is where you see what is missing from the knowledge base.

The Icelandic

The newest language models write decent Icelandic. They still do two things you have to correct in the instructions: they get too formal, and they translate English rhythm straight across. In practice this is solved by writing clear instructions about tone and giving examples of answers phrased the way you would phrase them yourself.

Test with real, informal questions too. People do not write full sentences in a chat window, they write "how much" and "open sat?".

What it costs

Setting one up for a small business is usually half a day to a day of work, and running it costs a few thousand krónur a month at normal traffic. The biggest job is not the technology, it is gathering the right answers into one place.

The chatbot on this site is an example of that. It knows our services, our prices and every article we have written, and if you ask it about something outside that information it tells you so and offers to put you in touch.

Frequently asked questions