What is conversational artificial intelligence? Whether via touch, voice, or text - today, people can easily interact with various applications and devices. To target a broader audience, attract more people, and provide a more personalized experience, companies appealed to innovative technology solutions. The latter include chatbots, voice assistants, messaging apps.   

Think of how many times a day you use Facebook, Siri, or WhatsApp. Dozens! This is the time when you interact with humanlike platforms. According to Gartner (News - Alert) forecasts, by 2020, people will manage 85 percent of their interactions with organizations without natural communication. 

Although voice assistants, chatbots, and messengers are often viewed as separate technological advancements, they can obviously converge in one powerful conversational platform to deliver all sorts of connections. Consumers choose to text to their favorite retailers instead of making a call to a support service. Thus, every business today should be prepared to hold this seamless interaction across every possible channel. Those who lag behind technology innovation would probably fail to thrive in a highly competitive environment. 

Messaging Applications

Being a low-cost alternative to emails, messaging apps have taken the love of millions of people over the world. With fast access to the Internet, these apps matured into AI-fueled platforms for communication. With the evolution of chatbots, some messaging apps were empowered with conversational AI. What benefits did it bring to businesses? 

1.         One-to-one communications in high-load enterprises. Today, businesses can hold millions of chats simultaneously using the app’s native user experience.

2.         Addressing a strong need in personalization. With data analytics advancements, businesses can create highly personalized offerings based on previous behavior, historical data, and individual interests. 

3.         Engaging consumers via push notifications. Once companies know what their consumer would like, they can send direct push messages containing some attractive offers for the chosen products or services. 

4.         Increasing revenue. AI-fueled chatbots can ensure end-to-end sales funnels that lead customers from awareness to purchase. 

5.         Enhancing productivity. AI conversational solutions can help people find the necessary information or schedule a meeting. These capabilities free up time for more important activities. 

Voice Assistants

Technically, voice bots differ from text bots slightly. Both harness the capabilities of artificial intelligence to communicate with users. The only thing that distinguishes text apps from voice assistants is their cost. A lot of people shifted to chatting because it was an excellent alternative to SMS. And if voice messaging is in-built, that gives even more opportunities for consumers. 

So, why voice assistants are worth your attention? Voice gives people speed. Saying a few words and sending them to your friend is much faster than texting for several minutes. Voice messages can take seconds to be sent. Another application of voice is giving commands like setting your alarm or checking emails with Siri’s help, for instance. Amazon Echo, for example, allows users to add items to their shopping lists or even purchase products on Amazon.   

Artificial Intelligence 

Each of the tech giants like Google, Facebook (News - Alert), or Amazon, is investing huge resources to drive digital transformation with the help of artificial intelligence. A lot of banks use the benefits of biometrics technology and personalized insights to provide conversational experience for consumers. So, AI-powered banking software solution is a good fit for those financial institutions that want to be a few steps ahead of their competitors. Banks exploit AI in front systems to provide seamless customer authentication, chatbots for humanlike communication with customers, and personalized recommendations based on previous user behavior. 

Although conversational platforms are one of the top trends for 2020, they still face some challenges. For example, Gartner says that the way of communication offered by bots is very structured, which very often leads to frustration among users. Conversational AI can be of different forms. Some platforms address only specific needs, the others offer everything to deliver excellent customer experience. 

Key Pillars of Conversational AI

So, what is actually conversational AI? Below are eight technologies that are used to create quite different realities, according to Deloitte (News - Alert):

1.         Natural Language Processing (NLP) ensures the ability to read texts composed by humans.

2.         Intent Recognition provides the capabilities to understand user requests.

3.         Entity Recognition is able to refer some text to a particular category, for example, “April” is “a month”. 

4.         Fulfillment is all about extracting data from databases through relevant APIs.

5.         Voice Responses is intended to deliver an optimized experience, for example, voice plus humanlike emotions.

6.         Dynamic Text to Speech can convert written text into sounds. 

7.         Machine Learning (ML) ensures that machines learn from humans how to respond.

8.         Contextual Awareness is the ability to find the needed information from the history of conversations. 

What Value Can Your Business Get from Conversational AI?

As you can see, conversational AI can do many things but, unfortunately, not every business understands what value it could deliver to them. Here is a list of the most attractive benefits of adopting conversational platforms and tools:

Enhance customer interaction with a company:

•          Consumers can easily search for information and buy what they need from anywhere.

•          People receive more personalized offerings and recommendations that are relevant to their expectations.

•          Customers get the best offer suggestions, which improves loyalty. 

Increase employee productivity and satisfaction:

•          AI-fueled bots can do some repetitive tasks instead of humans. The manual workload can be reduced. With automation, employees can focus on more meaningful tasks.

•          Robots can provide first-class training to support onboarding and recruitment in the most efficient way.

Increase revenue:

•          By supporting the marketing and sales departments, AI provides more opportunities for people to sell products.

•          Advanced and predictive analytics driven by AI empowers businesses with valuable insights and forecasts on what consumers will likely buy.

Final Words

Act now to feel the advantages of conversational AI. Whether you are a business owner or an everyday consumer, everybody can discover the innovation and decide if it is worth using this or that advancement of artificial intelligence. It builds new types of realities full of unexpected experiences, reshapes the way we interact with the world, and will someday grow in something more powerful than today. 

Author’s Bio

Iryna Kravchenko

Iryna works as a copywriter at Diceus. She creates blog articles as medium information between a company and its prospects and customers. She believes that people reading a copy seek service for themselves. With this in mind, Iryna is focused on clearly expressing her thoughts and speaking the readers’ language. Iryna’s professional interests include research, proofreading, and editing. She also contributes to web content creation, outreach, and content marketing activities.