This new breastfeeding help chatbot frustrates more than it informs

Nursing a baby at 3 a.m. – especially when it's not going well – can lead you down a Google rabbit hole. When all you want is for your baby to stop crying so you can both get back to sleep, getting hold of reliable and relevant information as soon as possible is vital.In an effort to help out new nursing parents at exactly this dark hour, Public Health England (PHE) has launched an interactive Facebook Messenger chatbot to encourage longer breastfeeding relationships.

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In a blog post announcingthe chatbot, PHE chief executive Duncan Selbie said the UK has the lowest rate of breastfeeding mothers in the world, but the "right support" can keep mums breastfeeding for longer. The Start4Life BreastFeeding Friend chatbot – BFF for short – aims to address this need for support with a tool that's accessible during the wee hours when healthcare professionals aren't available. This bot, as it turns out, probably won't give you the support you require."New babies need to be fed round the clock, and the peak times for online searches for breastfeeding help (by volume over 24 hours) are 2 and 6 a.m., when healthcare professionals and ‘phone helplines are not readily available," a spokesperson for PHE explained.Good point, and it makes sense to have around-the-clock access to trusted information. But the limitations of the bot are in how the information is obtained, not when.

When you're a new parent, a lot of the questions you have are general – Why is my baby crying? How do I know if the baby is hungry?When you ask those questions, either to a person or the internet, you need to get back answers that are robust. Alas, this chatbot won't give them to you.The main problem seems to lie in the bot's ability – or lack thereof – to process natural language. If you ask the bot a general question in sentence form, you will not get the answer you're looking for.

Credit: rachel thompson / mashable

The bot responds best when presented with shorter phrases and keywords, which will automatically throw up two or three paragraphs of advice. But being automated, it's limited in the number of keywords it responds to and you won't always get answers to questions that are specific enough to deal with your individual experience.

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Getting the most appropriate answer seems entirely dependent on knowing the exact question, which requires a level of knowledge that new parents might not have. And attempting to ask the perfect question while sleep deprived and emotional in the face of a crying baby seems like a rather miserable game, to put it mildly.

Case in point, asking "How many times a day should I nurse?" doesn't get you an answer. That's only one of the most basic questions a new nursing mom would have. You know, NBD.

Credit: rachel thompson / mashable

That said, there are solid step-by-step guides for latching on, expressing milk and introducing bottles, in addition to tips for feeding with and storing expressed milk. There's advice for increasing your milk supply, as well as information on things that can affect your supply and tips for stopping feeding. The FAQs are helpful. In fact, skipping the "conversation" and just checking those out is a pretty good way to go.

Credit: start4life / mashable

The bot provides easily-accessible basic advice on a platform where new mums are already likely to be. If you're one-handedly talking to a friend or family member on Messenger, then it's easy to fire off a message to the bot. But you'll very quickly run into the bot's limits and probably end up asking a human being for the information you need. Currently the bot isn't a substitute for the wealth of information that friends, family and medical professionals can provide; information that's backed up with a huge amount of personal experience.Parenting startup CEO Vivien de Tusch-Lec tried out the new bot to get some advice on phasing out breastfeeding. "It gave me the advice I needed. It took a little while to get there, but not as long as trawling through myriad Google search results," says de Tusch-Lec.But de Tusch-Lec says she was left with more questions the bot was unable to answer. Despite this, she found it helpful for getting consistent and authoritative views and says she wishes it had existed when she started breastfeeding. "It’s also useful as a quick reference tool where info is finely filtered according to questions, so ultimately I found it more accurate than other ways of finding info," she continued.

Credit: START4LIFE / RACHEL THOMPSON/ MASHABLE

Kay Brown – who runs a baby and toddler groupfor mums in the digital sector – says she's on the fence as to whether the chatbot is a good idea. "One of the greatest struggles when breastfeeding is getting the correct latch and a suitable position and this isn’t something a chatbot can tell or give you direct support with," Brown says.But, freelance PR Gina Clarke – who breastfed both her children for a year – says she was desperately in need of something like this chatbot. "Health visitor appointments could take days so I would often hang on for the breastfeeding helpline opening at 6am, but because it's staffed by volunteers I could rarely get through and had to turn to Dr Google quite a lot," says Clarke. At the same time, however, Clarke thinks that the bot is no replacement for IRL human support. "It certainly shouldn't replace the health visitor as the human voice, but having some instant support would have been incredibly handy when I was breastfeeding," Clarke continues.The chatbot is a great resource for providing trusted and instant advice for breastfeeding FAQs and it's certainly quicker and more reliable than trawling through Google. But, in its current state, it just doesn't go far enough to provide nuanced information for new mums who are figuring out how to do something they don't know how to do. For the time being, you're better off just heading to the NHS' breastfeeding website.

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