Videotron has entered the chatbot space, allowing users to receive AI-powered recommendations for what to watch by having a short conversation in Facebook Messenger.

Dubbed Chillico, the bot will ask users questions about things like favourite genres, their age and other interests to give suggestions about shows and films to watch from Illico, the company’s video-on-demand service.

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While many Canadian telecos, such as Rogers and Koodo, have offered access to human company reps through Facebook Messenger, Videotron says it is the first Canadian telecommunications company to offer a chatbot through the platform.

Furthermore, Videotron is taking something of a different approach to the chatbot space. While many of the companies that have expressed interest in chatbots have done so because of their ability to automate customer service functions, Videotron has launched a totally new service unrelated to things like billing as an experiment for how future customer service applications could be implemented.

“Chillico is our first experiment with chatbots,” said Julie Brault, VP of branding and ominchannel digital strategy at Videotron. “It will give us more information about how our customers interact with this type of innovative service. In the long term, we expect to learn how we can permanently incorporate bots into our customer service toolkit.”