Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now rapidly becoming business as usual. Chatbots and voicebots are examples of artificial intelligence that are seeing a great uptake in consumer-facing organizations. The wave that started with intelligent personal assistants on smartphones was soon bein leverage to create smart home appliances that are getting increasingly affordable. And now brands are fast getting on the bandwagon to create friendly bots that greet and guide customers through online experiences.
Chatbots can fetch complex data—such as calculating the number of cleaning machines deployed at a site or tracking the machine count workable in a particular year—and report without human error. Powered by a combination of machine learning and natural language processing, chatbots can provide customer service and other commercial support functions, helping businesses gain an edge over their competitors. Most importantly, businesses can pick and choose the level of maturity of their chatbots, depending upon the type of tasks they expect it to perform.
If you want your customers to be able to access information in a matter of few seconds without having to call any number and that too while surfing the net, the answer is chatbots (and voicebots for speech recognition).
These bots are intelligent personal assistants which can answer almost any user question in the most user-friendly way and in the shortest time possible. They work based on a pre-recorded set of answers, and answer in the same generic tone without making your customers wait. They are built so that it is difficult to distinguish whether it’s a real person answering the customer or a technology bot integrated with a web application.
With voice bots, unnecessary typing would soon be a memory of the distant past. Through speech recognition, your customers will have the privilege of asking a query without needing to type it.
When executed via voice commands, actions like editing images with the help of photo-editing software, booking follow-up meetings, setting up reminders, sending summary notes, and sharing files with the help of messaging apps would not be tedious tasks anymore. Voice has always been our most human, and most natural interface – so let’s make the most of it.
Voicebots and chatbots are intended to add value to customers’ personal as well as professional lives. They are programmed to be useful “on-demand” assistants to make conversations with humans more productive.
Chatbots can function like a personal assistant—without your customers having to hire new staff and train them or find additional space at the workplace. They can be built to schedule/cancel meetings and send/receive emails on behalf of customers. They can also send important reminders, giving you daily alerts on what’s scheduled for the day.
Chatbots could be programmed to answer thousands of questions frequently asked by customers all day, thus reducing the burden of calls hitting the call centers. They can serve to help customers in various languages, without the need to hire people trained in those languages. They can also assist in keeping track of what consumers think about your business by means of sending feedback forms to customers, and also through conversations they have with them. To a great extent, they can single-handedly help businesses monetize their social media platforms and push business promotions and offers.
Conversational interfaces work on the basis of carefully designed inner logic that allows them to respond from a wide variety of options in any given context. Here's a look at the working of a typical conversational interface:
A user on a messaging platform sends a message to the bot that is processed through Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Then, the bot can launch an action or answer with real-time information from a database/API, or hand over to a human
The bot improves with every message it receives; this is called machine learning. In case a human helps the bot learn, it’s called supervised learning
Given their large-scale adoption, and customers' increasing comfort in interacting with chatbots, it's time for businesses to start putting chatbots/voicebots in place to streamline customer interactions.
Srijan’s technical teams work on creating conversational interfaces which can handle every query that a user might possibly have. We start with understanding enterprise requirements and create PoCs to help stakeholders get to the desired prototype. Our teams then move to final production, aimed at solving specific business challenges.
Where can conversational solutions fit into your brand communication strategy? Chat with our AI experts, and explore how Srijan can help implement chatbots/voicebots for your enterprise.