Nowadays, customers want a fast response and rapid solution to their complaints. They seek instant support and personalised experiences from the brands. Moreover, each one of them wants to be heard and treated as an individual, not like “cases” or “tickets”. In such cases, companies seek omnichannel, personalised, and real-time customer experiences because the old tools have gone obsolete. Now to solve this issue, conversational AI comes into the picture. Here we will discuss everything about conversational AI and things associated with it.
Conversational AI
Conversational artificial intelligence is a technology similar to virtual agents and chatbots that customers can talk to. They use large quantities of data, machine learning, and natural language processing for enhancing human conversations, identifying speech & text inputs, and understanding their meanings in almost all languages.
How does Conversational AI Work?
The working of conversational AI is simple, conversational AI translates language so that a machine can easily understand it and respond to it in a human manner.
This whole procedure is completed in three stages:
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)
Natural Language Understanding (NLU) or Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Text-to-Speech (TTS) with voice synthesis
The customer hits the system via text or voice, ASR technology identifies the request, understands the language, and knows the context behind it. Furthermore, the NLP processes the request so it can be easily understood by the NLU and replied to by TTS and voice synthesis. The ML algorithms of the system learn from the data collected over time to enhance the accuracy, performance, and response quality of the whole system.
NLP and ML are both essential in the system, NLP analyzes the user's request and takes it to a logical conclusion. ML training models allow the system to continuously understand, learn and improve even without any human programming.
Types of Conversational AI
One of the most popular applications of conversational AI is a chatbot. A conversational AI chatbot allows the company to automate the process of customer communication for marketing, promoting, and supporting their business. It can be easily implemented on the website of the company or other channels like Facebook Messenger, Slack, Whatsapp, etc.
Apart from the usual chatbot stuff, organisations can use the power of conversational AI platforms to make a variety of applications.
Here are a few popular conversational AI examples:
Mobile Assistants
The well-known mobile assistants are Google Now And Apple Siri. It allows the users to perform certain tasks quickly and effectively without the hassle of typing. Additionally, it includes sending text messages and asking for the weather updates and results of a search query.
Voice Assistants
The voice-enabled assistants allow the device users to perform non-transactional queries like playing music, making phone calls, setting alarms, knowing whether reports, sending text messages, etc. Google Home and Amazon Alexa are two prime examples of voice assistants.
IVR systems
IVR systems or Interactive Voice Response are used in many call centres, enabling companies to use service automation for reducing overall customer service costs. With conversational AI IVR that is powered by NLU and ML can easily control the conversation in a natural way.
Examples of conversational AI
The simplest example of conversational AI can be a FAQ bot or interacting bot that can respond to your queries. The conversational AI possesses the top level of maturity hence they also act as virtual personal assistants. Examples of conversational AI are Apple Siri, Google Home, and Amazon Alexa. They listen to you and understand your exact requirement therefore immediately deliver it.
What is the difference between a chatbot and conversational AI?
Conversational AI is the conversation based on the AI chatbot. AI-based chatbots make use of conversational AI to understand the conversation with you. Moreover, machine learning, or simply ML allows the chatbots to remember the things said to them. Natural language processing enables chatbots to understand a wide range of queries and resolve them ASAP. Additionally, the intelligent analysis allows the chatbots to recommend stuff based on their past interactions and records.
Conversational AI is all about the programming and tools that enable the device to act and carry out customised interactions with people. On the other hand, a chatbot is a program that may or may not use conversational AI but still communicates with people.
Conversational AI powers chatbots but not all chatbots are powered by conversational AI.
Why is conversational AI popular?
Conversational AI is an evolving technology that is highly popular and used across the world. Since conversational AI does not rely on manually written scripts, it allows the companies to deliver highly automated personalised customer service resolutions on a large scale. Additionally, it makes every interaction unique and relevant thus reducing effort and resolution time. It results in a higher level of customer satisfaction and delivering personalised solutions.
How is conversational AI different?
Conversational AI is different from traditional chatbots because it uses Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and other human-like behaviours for establishing natural conversations. It can be done via voice, gesture input, touch, or text because, unlike traditional bots, conversational AI is omnichannel.
Conclusion
As per the MIT survey, more than 90% of businesses reported improvements in complaint resolution speeds by using conversational AI. Moreover, other research suggests that by the end of 2022, around 90% of customer service queries will be resolved by virtual agents, and by 2023, conversational AI will allow businesses to save more than 5 billion hours.