Forethought aims to build more accurate chatbots with constrained generative AI models

Forethought has been building chatbots since 2017 with increasing levels of sophistication, intelligence and automation. Today, the startup announced the next phase in their development. It’s bringing generative AI to the platform with a beta release of a new tool called SupportGPT.

The product is designed to deliver auto-generated customer service responses without the need for human intervention. In spite of the blinding hype associated with generative AI, it’s still early days for the technology and there are limitations. CEO and co-founder Deon Nicholas says that his company recognizes this and has designed the generative AI in SupportGPT to use a narrower set of data than more generalized GPT applications, which he says should help deliver more accurate answers.

“With SupportGPT, our customers can start to access more focused answers to their customer's questions,” Nicholas told TechCrunch. While it uses OpenAI technology under the hood, it has been modified and enhanced with Forethought's engineering spin on the concept.

He recognizes that one of the big issues and challenges with generative AI in its current state is blatantly wrong answers, but he believes by limiting the set of answers the model can access, it can reduce these kinds of “hallucinations” we’ve been seeing where the AI confidently answers incorrectly.

“Hallucinations, where the AI goes off the rails, is the main problem of generative AI, and so we've developed a few clever algorithms, while leveraging the existing infrastructure that people have been building,” he said. “Forethought feeds this to the generative model as a prompt or even as what you'd call a guide, and it ends up being a lot more tightly coupled to the customer's actual workflow, customers' actual business.”