Enhance Your SEO & Privacy with FastBots AI Chatbots

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• Transcript

  Sebastian Schieke (00:01.559)
  Hey, today I talk to Jason West. He's the founder of FastBots AI, which is an amazing company which you can use to build your own bots. And we talk lots about AI, where it's going. There's so much happening in this industry. And Jason is a very well -nourished expert in this field. So Jason, welcome to the show.
  
  Jason West (00:25.742)
  Thank you very much for having me, Sebastian.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (00:28.631)
  I'm a client of FastBots for years. And yeah, maybe before we start, maybe give some background on yourself. How did you get into this business of creating these bot engines and offering services in the AI space?
  
  Jason West (00:47.374)
  Yeah, sure. So, well, I've been online now and making my living online since 2000, so a long time. I've done all kinds of different businesses online, from e -commerce to directories to software courses, just about everything really. But I've always had a passion for software. I love software and, you know, having created a few things in the past that did very well.
  
  And then seeing this new AI tech that we've all got access to since OpenAI kind of made it very public and easy to use back in December of 22, I think it was. Yeah, I saw obviously a few people out there doing AI chat bots, and I just love the concept completely. So I wanted to do my own version. And, you know, I was already a bit behind because a lot of people launched...
  
  in sort of early 23. And so rather than start completely from scratch, I decided to see if I could find some software that had already been built and then improve it from there. So that's what I did. I purchased FastWatts, but it wasn't called that then back in August of 23 and then rebranded it and made it my own. And we've worked on it, you know, ever since.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (01:54.551)
  Mm -hmm.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (02:11.319)
  Great. So can you explain what a bot is? Because I guess for many listeners, they might know chat GPT, but they think, yeah, if I put my data into chat GPT, the whole world will know it. And how can I create my own version of chat GPT, which is basically private and I can...
  
  Jason West (02:30.294)
  Yeah.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (02:40.823)
  put all my personal data in this. This is possible with something like fast bots, right?
  
  Jason West (02:46.464)
  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, with ChatGBT, I think it is possible. I'm not sure if it's possible on the free account or not, but certainly on the plus account, you can kind of press a little slider that turns it off so that what you give it, it doesn't get used to train the model. But yeah, generally speaking, I mean, they've got pretty much free reign when you're using that platform. With FastBots, what's happening is you're uploading your own data into a secure area away from OpenAI.
  
  And then OpenAI is referencing that information. And then, you know, you're having a natural conversation with that data via OpenAI. However, because we're connecting to OpenAI with the API, the data isn't stored or used by them. So it's not being used to train the model. So yeah, it's a really good solution.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (03:40.375)
  It sounds like a perfect tool to create your chatbot, for example, for customer service or as a sales add -on or maybe as a tool to train your employees. You can create your standard operating procedure, put this into this bot and say, OK, when you have a new team member, go to the site, enter your questions, and there you get your answers.
  
  Jason West (04:04.238)
  Yeah, definitely. There's a whole load of use cases for it. I think the quick and easy one is to put it on your website and then use it to help any website visitors with questions. And we found that some people who are very sort of SEO focused have said that the time people spend on the website goes up when you add a chat bot because people hang around there, they start typing, they wait for the response. And that's a good signal for Google.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (04:26.071)
  Mm -hmm.
  
  Jason West (04:30.71)
  to rank you higher when people are going to your site and staying on it. It's sticky. So there's that benefit. But yeah, I think a quick and easy win for any company looking to use AI at the moment is to put an AI chatbot train just on your company, your business, put it on your website and get it working for you 24 -7 to answer questions. Just simple questions that website visitors might have.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (04:30.975)
  Ah.
  
  Jason West (04:54.254)
  but perhaps they don't have time to email you, browse through your entire site and try and find that one bit of information they want.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (05:02.839)
  And many people probably think, yet, I cannot train a bot, so I don't know how to do that, you know? I mean, what does training mean?
  
  Jason West (05:07.926)
  Yeah.
  
  Training really is very quick and easy process. It literally is a sort of giving the chatbot your website link. That's one quick way of doing it. And then it will scour the whole site, pull in all of the pages and then grab all of that text from the site. And then that goes into a secure database, which then we can use for training the chatbot. Likewise, you can just grab something off your desktop, a PDF or a Word doc.
  
  You know, maybe like you say, you've got some standard operating procedures or something like that. You can drag that straight into the chatbot to train it on that as well.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (05:47.863)
  So it's a very easy process. Basically everyone can do. You don't need technical skills. Yeah.
  
  Jason West (05:51.502)
  Yeah, definitely. You don't need any tech skills. That's right. No coding or any of that stuff. It's just a simple process.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (06:00.343)
  And then you look at your user base, what is the most used case for this bot?
  
  Jason West (06:07.278)
  Yeah, interesting. I was just talking about that with someone else and we've got such a varied use case scenario going on with our customers, all kinds of clever things. Like for example, we had someone who had one of these kind of PDF flipbooks, a manufacturer with all of these incredible technological machines in that you could purchase and at the end of it, they'd embedded their chatbot into the PDF.
  
  so that anybody who was reading that could then go in and ask questions about the machines and things. That's, yeah, that was pretty cool. I thought, that's very clever. I liked that. Then we've got, you know, educational institutions, colleges, universities, putting it on their site to help out students, for example. And of course, students tend to be very multinational. So being able to learn about the college or university with, in their own language, just chatting through a little chat bot is really, really handy.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (06:40.567)
  That's interesting.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (06:44.597)
  Yeah.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (06:56.085)
  Hmm.
  
  Jason West (07:05.422)
  saves a lot of miscommunication and great for the university, it's great for the students. So there's so many use cases.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (07:13.463)
  So you just have to think outside the box and look for potential areas where you want to provide value to your customers or your staff. Take the information and then just copy it to the bot. And this is the training process, which is basically very, very simple to use. And then you integrate it with some small code snippets on your website and off you go. Yeah.
  
  Jason West (07:21.27)
  Yep.
  
  Jason West (07:27.598)
  it.
  
  Jason West (07:31.488)
  Yep.
  
  Jason West (07:38.382)
  That's it. Yep. And also we do that for you as well. So like usually people either are a DIY type person, they do it all themselves. They know their website and with a bit of help, they can put it in themselves. Or you get people who have a web designer who does all that stuff for them and you just send them the code. Or you just ask us to do it and give us a login and we'll go and put it in for you anyway. So there can literally no technical stuff that you have to do at all to have.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (07:48.311)
  Hmm.
  
  Jason West (08:07.5)
  What are these AI chatbots running on your site for you?
  
  Sebastian Schieke (08:10.615)
  Amazing, I mean, we both are in business for decades and imagine how we had to do things in the past, you know, you always needed lots of developers and coding experience and then you got a clunky interface and clunky. Yeah, it's completely crazy. So, I mean, where does it, where does it develop it to? I mean, when you see the last year and I mean, I running a...
  
  Jason West (08:19.574)
  Alright.
  
  Jason West (08:24.654)
  Ugh. It's a new world now.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (08:40.927)
  AI program for CEOs. I teach them how to leverage AI to 10x their effectiveness. And it's crazy what happened in the last year or year and a half since JetGBT was developed. But as we see this exponential growth, looking in the future, I don't want to think about what will happen in the development we will go through. So what's your prediction?
  
  Jason West (08:47.468)
  Brilliant.
  
  Jason West (09:07.854)
  Yeah. Well, you know, just today, I mean, I listen to AI related news every single day. So I'm constantly, you know, have my finger on the pulse when it comes to this stuff. And just the other day, you know, Nvidia did their conference and was talking and demonstrating their robots. And I think this is where the next the next massive change is going to be is is the amalgamation of large language models and robots.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (09:26.199)
  Hmm.
  
  Jason West (09:35.534)
  So at the end of the day, if you've got a robot that can use GPT Vision, for example, and understand its surroundings, you know, now we're into whole new territory here. So I think, yeah, you know, humanoid robots as they're called, I think that's going to be a massive change. Obviously, you've got Tesla are doing one as well. And yeah, they're...
  
  They've proven to be pretty innovative company in the past. So, and I'm sure Elon Musk wants to be first, first, first, like always. So yeah, I think there's some massive changes coming. So many changes really with AI in general and moviemaking and things like that.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (10:13.911)
  Yeah, talking about movie making, I'm participating in a conference at the moment, Abandoned 360 from Peter Diamandis. And yesterday was an interesting conversation and someone asked the question, how long will it take until I can get a book to an AI and it creates a movie? And the answer was two years.
  
  Jason West (10:35.672)
  Yeah, I believe that's probably very true. Very true. I think at some point, you know, there'll be like Hollywood style movies as good as Hollywood style movies being made by teenagers in their bedrooms. It's just gonna happen. It's a dead cert really. What happens then? I don't know. You know, everything is gonna have a massive shakeup, I believe.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (10:39.167)
  Yeah.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (10:57.015)
  the industry, I mean, all the different participants in industry, movie companies, investment companies, they all must have sleepless nights now.
  
  Jason West (11:04.814)
  Yeah.
  
  Jason West (11:09.838)
  Massively, massively, yeah. I mean, it is going to be really unusual, weird, you know, happening is going to go on. Big shake up, I believe.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (11:18.721)
  Yeah, very interesting time we live in. Yeah, so building these bots, I mean, you run fast bots. Is there anything else you're focusing on at the moment in terms of AI business and creating that?
  
  Jason West (11:38.158)
  Well, I think it's always a good idea to try and stay focused on the one business at a time. I mean, you know, when I first started out all those years ago, I was always trying new things. You know, you see something, you hear about a hot niche and you're off, you know, whether that's creating niche blog sites for SEO and AdSense or, and then suddenly it's drop shipping or...
  
  Sebastian Schieke (11:46.421)
  Yeah.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (11:54.613)
  Yeah.
  
  Jason West (12:02.446)
  I've done all of that. And obviously as you get older and wiser, you realize that if you really want to make something successful, you've got to keep going at it and not keep going for the new shiny object. So for me now, I want to try and make FastBots the best at what it does. I want to try and bring in new technologies as they become available, you know, such as the GPT Vision and all of that kind of thing. And just try and solve as many problems as I can for business owners using that technology.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (12:06.903)
  Stay focused, yeah.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (12:33.943)
  And what is your typical client? How does it look? Is it a small to medium size business?
  
  Jason West (12:40.686)
  Well, yeah, again, we seem to have attracted a real range of people, you know, we've got obviously many small businesses, we've got some larger sort of educational institutions that are coming on board and been testing us out for quite some time. We've got Booking .com who are currently testing us out.
  
  for their car rental division. So we've got big companies and little companies and everything in between really. So I think everybody's looking for this solution. So no matter how big an organization they are, some of them are still behind and looking for that extra help with AI and that's where we can come on in and help.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (13:20.631)
  Honestly, when I heard that Jet GPT is releasing GPTs, I thought all these businesses offering these bots, they have a really tough time now because these GPTs are also offering a similar functionality. But now we see that this is not the case. It's actually I think you guys are thriving. You are making more business than ever before.
  
  Jason West (13:38.584)
  Yes.
  
  Jason West (13:49.59)
  Yep.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (13:49.719)
  How do you differentiate fast bots to open AI and GPTs?
  
  Jason West (13:54.966)
  Yeah, now that's a great question. Now, firstly, the interesting thing was on the day that that was announced, we had more people sign up than ever. So all it did was really bring about this sort of awareness. That's all it did was quickly get everybody aware that you could make these custom GPTs. And then, thankfully, I think the one thing that's not great about chat GPT is the interface.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (14:04.215)
  Oh.
  
  Awareness, yeah, awareness.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (14:14.303)
  Mm -mm.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (14:22.559)
  Oh yeah. Clunky. Yeah.
  
  Jason West (14:22.882)
  Everybody knows it's like, I mean, it's terrible. These guys have got multi -millions of pounds, some of the most talented programmers in the world, and they still haven't made, yeah, a user -friendly, I mean, you could say the same about Mid Journey, the AI image generator. It's in a disk core. It's horrible, absolutely horrible. So some of these companies have got the best tech in the world, but they don't make nice user -friendly, easy wrappers.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (14:32.087)
  but horrible to sign us.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (14:39.319)
  using Discord. Yes, it is.
  
  Jason West (14:52.654)
  And I'd like to think that Fastbox is really more than just a wrapper of this technology. We're adding our own features in to make it really nice, a lead generation tool, for example. ChatGBT won't do that anytime soon. So yeah, we're trying to add an awful lot more value to the whole experience than just what ChatGBT does. And also, I don't know about yourself, but I haven't actually been that impressed with the GPT builder.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (15:20.855)
  I agree, I agree. I tested one simple use case of analyzing, I mean, I work for banks, so analyzing balance statements, for example, and putting it into your product and one of your competitors compared to GPT. I thought, hey, I mean, GPT, are you drunk? Are you lazy? What's happening? You know, I mean,
  
  Jason West (15:46.07)
  Yeah.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (15:50.391)
  I don't know what's going on. And also what I like on solutions like fast bots is it's predictable. With ChetGBT, you often have a situation where sometimes it's working very well, and then it doesn't deliver anything. And it tells you, oh, we could do this. And you say, yes, but please do this.
  
  Jason West (15:58.574)
  Yes.
  
  Jason West (16:10.958)
  Yeah, I know. I went round in circles only yesterday and actually I tried Gemini as well and Claude3 all to do the same task and all of them, they failed. I had to do it myself in the end, they failed. And it was only really creating a spreadsheet with Google AdWords set up, like your campaign name, your keywords.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (16:17.685)
  Mm -hmm.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (16:28.215)
  Yeah.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (16:33.141)
  Mm -hmm.
  
  Jason West (16:37.134)
  ad and so on, but it was just too much like hard work in the end. And I'm pretty good at prompting and I couldn't really get it to do a good job. So there's room for improvement, you know, a lot of room for improvement with these languages still.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (16:42.197)
  Mm -hmm.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (16:49.143)
  Yeah, but as you are using the API, how do you make sure that FastBot gets accurate answers based on the data and not starts hallucinating or saying, oh, today is not a good day for me?
  
  Jason West (17:04.296)
  Yep, that's it. Well, we can do that with our system prompt that we use behind the scenes. And also we allow people to enter their own prompts as well to kind of really tailor what that chatbot will do for them. For example, if they want their chatbot to be really friendly or humorous or, you know, super serious, we can change that within the software so that their chatbot...
  
  Sebastian Schieke (17:15.479)
  Mm -hmm.
  
  Jason West (17:30.786)
  sort of does things the way that they would like. So we have control over how we work with that API, and then we're locking it down to just the data that we give it to work from. If it doesn't know the answer, which is funny enough, quite a sort of strong fear from a lot of users, and like, well, what happens if it doesn't know the answer? We just say, we're really sorry we don't know the answer. Please contact customer support on this email or...
  
  Sebastian Schieke (17:42.495)
  Hmm.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (17:55.831)
  Exactly. Yeah.
  
  Jason West (17:56.878)
  And that's it, no problem. We're not going to say, you know, some crazy answer.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (18:02.551)
  And why do you think these JGBT, Claude, and how they are called are so unpredictable? What is behind? Why is this the case?
  
  Jason West (18:13.006)
  Well, you know, I suppose you've got to look at this tech. We're getting used to it now, but ultimately it's still extremely new and experimental. And they're being updated in the background without us being told. So literally one day you could see one result and the next you could be slightly different. So, you know, they're constantly refining and trying to improve it and obviously using humans as well to try and improve the results.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (18:20.663)
  Hmm.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (18:26.709)
  Yeah.
  
  Jason West (18:39.95)
  but they still have their annoyances, you know, for example, as I'm sure many people, if they've used ChatGPT quite a lot, you'll see those repetitive same old words being used like elevate or unlock or unleash or the classic revolutionize, which they all seem to do. They all seem to do that. Claude 3 as well, you know, it drives you crazy and you can't seem to get rid of them, even if you specifically say to do that.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (18:57.439)
  Yeah, yeah.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (19:04.981)
  Mmm.
  
  Jason West (19:08.654)
  they can still do it. So they're not perfect yet and perhaps we're all being a little bit, you know, too presumptuous that they should be at this point because after all this is an amazing advancement in tech and with that comes a few hurdles in the beginning.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (19:23.775)
  Exactly. It's like when you fly in a plane, you know, I mean in the past we had no internet. Yeah, I mean it was totally acceptable, you know, no one questioned it. And then once you have internet and it doesn't work for any reason, people get really annoyed.
  
  Jason West (19:29.036)
  Yeah.
  
  Jason West (19:35.918)
  Oh, yeah, that's like World War III breaking out. Yeah, 100%. We get to these points, don't we, where we just expect. And I mean, you know, two years ago to have like an article or a full brainstorming session created by AI would have been unbelievable. But already we're starting to get a little bit like, that's not bad, I suppose. You know, we're really hard to please, aren't we?
  
  Sebastian Schieke (19:42.935)
  Yeah.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (19:59.873)
  Yeah, yeah, definitely. So looking ahead, you mentioned a couple of features you're implementing. Is there anything you have on the release right now? We're seeing the next couple of weeks, maybe there's something major coming.
  
  Jason West (20:15.234)
  Yep. Well, we're always working on something. We actually have our dev team split into two. So we have one who is creating, splitting up the platform into different modules almost that will work together. So if there's something wrong with one module, it won't affect the other. So we have one part of our team doing that. And the other part is doing any small bug fixes that come up. We like to fix those super quick.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (20:19.519)
  Mm.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (20:30.199)
  Mm -hmm.
  
  Jason West (20:43.502)
  And then doing new features. And the new features we're working on at the moment is trying to integrate it with more platforms. We're already with Zapier, which is great, but we want to implement it with as many social media platforms as we can and WhatsApp and so on. But yeah, we're doing little tweaks here and there. At the end of the day, our product is really that chat window and those great conversations. So...
  
  At the moment, we're trying to alert people to the fact that there is the little chat bubble there in the bottom right -hand side. So we're implementing sounds now. So when the website loads, just a little thing and it grows a little bit, shrinks back down just to draw people's attention to that AI help that's there. And yeah, lots of other exciting things in the pipeline.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (21:28.597)
  Mm -hmm.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (21:34.743)
  Amazing. I can't wait to play around with the new features. And we will also put a link in the show notes that people can check out the application, of course. And yeah.
  
  Jason West (21:44.558)
  Great.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (21:53.271)
  If we look ahead on, I mean, we talked a lot about how AI might affect us and different businesses. There's always this fear that it will replace a lot of jobs. I have my opinion about that. What's your view? I mean, when we look at the movie industry, for example, does it really, will it really?
  
  get people out of business or build a find maybe, will there be new jobs created with this new technology which basically puts us as a society on another level? I mean, that could also be an option.
  
  Jason West (22:36.398)
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. Well, I think it, I've heard this example mentioned a couple of times by people and I think it's quite a good one. It's like, you know, artists back in the day doing their paintings and then come along photographers. And you think straight away, well, why would you bother to sit there painting a picture when you can get just a perfect, perfect copy of that scene, you know, with a camera? That's it, all artists are out of business. Well, of course, that wasn't the case.
  
  but things did change. And then, you know, photographers ended up making a fortune out of photography. And that's another whole new industry and business now. So just because something new that could take over a little bit from the previous thing comes along, it doesn't mean that we're all suddenly going to be made redundant, as it were. And I think at this stage of the game, you know, it's fairly obvious what AI could take over and which jobs
  
  could be in danger at some point. And, you know, the thing is, as people, we have to look ahead a little bit and think like that and think, right, you know, is what I'm doing now possible, going to be taken over? Is it? And sometimes you have to face the truth. You have to face the truth and accept the fact that things are changing and you either move with them and adjust or you potentially go down.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (23:47.511)
  still relevant. Yeah.
  
  Jason West (24:01.102)
  Um, I think writing jobs are, you know, a tricky, you know, there, there has already been, I think some statistics showing that the number of people requesting, uh, writers on platforms such as Upwork and Flee freelancer and so on have gone down. And that's because obviously people have got, you know, pretty good AI writing technology now. I think Claude three is particularly good at that actually.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (24:20.183)
  Yeah. To us. Yeah.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (24:25.879)
  Hmm.
  
  Jason West (24:26.094)
  So yeah, there's going to be certain jobs that will go slowly, I feel. Developers perhaps down the line, I still think it's a bit early for that, but even so, you know, the writing's on the wall. And I listened to an interview just yesterday with Sam Altman, you know, saying that he reckons about five years before, you know, programming will be done with just pure natural language so anyone can do it.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (24:31.135)
  Developers. Yeah.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (24:38.741)
  Hmm.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (24:52.599)
  Amazing. Yeah.
  
  Jason West (24:53.71)
  So you've got to start thinking ahead if you're in any of these industries, in my opinion, and not have your head in the sand. Because, you know, be on the winning side here and think, how can I adjust? I think manual jobs are pretty good for a while, because obviously, yes, we've got robots coming and everything else. But, you know, that then in itself, you know, brings about all kinds of different changes. The law is going to be changed so much over the next 20 years, I'm sure.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (25:00.183)
  Yeah.
  
  Jason West (25:20.75)
  You know, I mean, if you've got a, let's just really move forward here and say that, you know, you've got access to AGI, you've got a robot in your house. You know, what is that robot allowed to do? What can't it do? Where can it go? What happens if it breaks the law? You know, there's so many things coming over the next 20 years. It'd be really fascinating to see it play out and hopefully it plays out for the better of humanity.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (25:33.547)
  Ha ha.
  
  Yeah.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (25:47.991)
  Interesting, interesting. We definitely need to stay in touch and exchange ideas in the future. It is an amazing time you live in and yeah, with people like you pushing the boundaries on AI and offering the solutions to people who are not tech savvy and don't really want to become an AI expert, great value you provide to the world. Thanks, Jason, so much for your time.
  
  Jason West (25:53.262)
  Sure.
  
  Jason West (26:16.398)
  No problem, thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (26:17.815)
  Yeah. And yeah, keep up doing good work. And for everyone who wants to test chatbots AI, there will be a link below this video and in the show notes. And I can only encourage you guys, give it a go. It's an amazing product.
  
  Jason West (26:34.958)
  Thank you very much.
  
  Sebastian Schieke (26:36.439)
  Thank you. Good. Wait a sec, where's my mouse? I have too many. Where's my mouse?
  
  my trackpad. Yeah, here we go. Thanks a lot. Yeah, I mean...
  
  Jason West (26:50.572)
  Alright.
  
  Yeah, no worries, Sebastian.