Revolutionize Conversations: Unveiling the Power of Conversational AI

What is Conversational AI

Conversational AI is the use of Artificial Intelligence and a set of technologies to create natural, human like conversations between computers and humans.

Imagine you’re shopping online for a clothing item and want to confirm if the item would be delivered to you the day after. You call in and a speak to a representative and while you’re dealing with an answer, you ask if the item is available in another preferred color. The representative begins suggesting colors based on your preferences and your previous shopping history. The rep enquires the purpose for buying the clothing item and shares pictures of some other clothes you’d adore that fits the occasion.

The person over the phone is intelligent, and perfectly understands your needs. You begin to feel like the person knows you more than your best friend. Only, she’s not your friend, moreover, she’s not human.

Let’s explore more about Conversational AI — its feature, functions, types, the business advantage and how it can transform industries with the help of some real world applications. Let’s also take a peek into the technologies that it employs to deliver human like conversations, or in some cases, better than human like interactions.

What are the feature of Conversational AI

Outlined below are features of Conversational AI that make computers simulate humans — what make these digital interactions smooth and human like.

Natural Language Processing (NLP):

This allows the AI to understand and interpret human language like we do. It’s the core of the technology that makes the computers comprehend not only regular words and its associated meaning, but recognize slang, context and the nuances of everyday speech.

Intent Recognition:

Conversational AI can understand user’s intent behind a statement or a question, so that it can respond with a clear purpose and move the conversation in the right direction.

Context Awareness:

The AI understands the context of the conversation, remembering past interactions to provide more coherent and relevant responses. Also the use of demonstratives such as ‘this’, ‘that’, and ‘it’, can be understood perfectly.

Emotion Recognition:

More advanced Conversational AI systems can detect emotional tone in a user’s input, adding another layer of understanding to the interaction. The AI then alters their responses based on these deeper understandings.

Personalization:

Responses can also be based on user preferences and historical data fetched from customer data platforms to create more personalized experiences. These tailored customer experiences are sought by e-commerce platforms and marketers to acquire new customers and gain loyalty of existing ones.

Multi-Turn Conversations:

Conversational AI not only understands one-off interactions, but can engage in multi-turn conversations, remembering the context throughout the entire thread and evolving the dialogue over time. Moreover, it can access historical information from data platforms to build a deeper understanding of the context.

Multimodal Interaction:

Some conversational AIs provide a richer interaction experience by incorporating various modes of communication, such as text chat, voice, and even visuals.

Continuous Learning:

Conversational AI systems improve over time and adapt to changing user needs and language patterns, by constantly learning from user interactions, feedback, and algorithmic improvements in the system.

Integration with other Systems:

Conversational AI can be integrated with other applications and systems such as CRM, and Customer Data Platforms, and other domain specific software to enhance its capabilities, providing a more comprehensive solution.

Security and Privacy:

Another crucial feature of Conversational AI systems is its ability to deal with sensitive information in a secure way by adhering to data privacy policies of the organization.

These features collectively contribute to creating a more natural, efficient, and enjoyable conversation between humans and machines.

Conversational Functions

Conversational AI can serve various functions based on the domain, and specific business needs.

To Inform

Acting as a virtual assistant, it can disseminate knowledge in a conversational manner by providing users with relevant information, updates or news.

For instance, in the context of an insurance company, it can inform policy holders about the terms and conditions of their policy. It can update them about the changes in their scheme if there are any. It can do these tasks efficiently with perfect consistency, even better than a human agent.

To Sell

It can analyze user preferences and behaviors and offer personalized product recommendations to enhance customer user experience. Conversational AI can assist customers by providing information related to availability of items, helping them in placing orders, and tracking shipments.

The AI system can also help in up selling and cross selling items further boosting the sales for a company.

To Support

Customer support is another area that can be transformed with the integration of Conversational AI. It can handle customer support task with efficiency and troubleshoot and provide support in real time. It excels at addressing frequently asked questions and can guide users patiently through problem solving steps related to their products or services.

The performance of the support system can also be augmented with ML and AI integration to enhance fault detection, offering better problem resolution over time.

To Operate

Conversation AI can be integrated not only at the interface of business and customer relation, but between various systems within the organization. It can be used to enhance communication and collaboration between different departments of the business. The system can help in training of organization staff assisting them in their learning in a personalized manner.

It can be integrated in to existing systems to boost its performance. For instance, in the sales department it can be used to schedule appointments, set reminders and assist the personnel with accurate information required during sales calls.

In each of these functions, Conversational AI aims to enhance user experience by providing timely, relevant, and personalized interactions. Whether it’s delivering information, facilitating transactions, offering support, or automating tasks within the organization, it contributes to a more seamless and efficient interaction between users and technology.

Types of Conversational AI

Types of Conversational AI serve specific purposes as they cater to different situations and scenarios.

Chatbots

Chatbots are text-based conversational agents that interact with users through messaging interfaces, websites, or applications. They are available to customers 24/7 regardless of the support staff work timings, and can be employed in scenarios for customer support purposes, answering of FAQs, or facilitating simple transactions.

They also suggest relevant question prompts to assist the user to frame their queries efficiently and can route the conversation to a human agent when required.

Chatbots are not a new concept but the underlying technology but capabilities differentiate Traditional Chatbots from Conversational AI Chatbots.

Difference between Traditional Chatbots and AIChatbots

Conversational IVR

Conversational IVR, or Interactive Voice Response is an evolution of traditional IVR systems, which was often used by consumers to navigate a menu system through keypad inputs. Conversational IVR allows users to interact with automated systems using spoken language or natural language input.

Conversational IVR utilizes AI technology to understand the context of the conversation, allowing for more coherent and personalized interactions. It can remember previous user inputs within the session. It can recognize the user’s intention or purpose behind their spoken input, allowing it to provide relevant and accurate responses.

It can route calls to the appropriate department, provide information, or even complete simple transactions based on user requests. It can be used in customer support, appointment scheduling, transaction processing or in conducting surveys and feedback.

Interactive Voice Assistance

I’m sure you’re aware of this type of Conversational AI. Siri by Apple, Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and Microsoft Cortana are prominent examples of interactive voice assistants. Vehicles today also come equipped with interactive voice assistance.

Interactive Voice Assistance refers to systems or applications that enable users to interact with technology or devices using spoken language. It is meant to provide a hands free interaction to perform tasks, ask questions, or give commands without the need for physical input devices.

Voice Bots

Voice Bots, or Voice Chatbots are conversational agents that use voice as the primary mode of interaction. These bots leverage technologies like automatic speech recognition (ASR) and Translation applications to process and respond to human speech

They contribute to a more intuitive and user friendly experience, especially in scenarios where hands-free or voice-centric interactions are preferred or necessary.

Under the hood of Conversational AI

ASR: When a user inputs text or speaks, Conversational AI begins by making sense of the text or the speech. In the case of speech input, the speech is first converted to text with the help of ASR, or Automatic Speech Recognition. An ASR is a speech to text conversion application that recognizes the words within the sound waves.

The raw text obtained is now sent to a NLP, or Natural Language Processing model.

NLP: NLPs job is to analyze and interpret the sequence of words in the raw text and generate a response in return. A Natural Language Processing model consists of three main components — NLU, NLG and Reinforcement Learning.

NLU: Natural Language Understanding or NLU is responsible for creating an understanding of the raw text provided to the system. It analyzes the text to understand intent and structures, based on context.

For instance let’s take the sentence, “Find the best pizza place in Vegas”. The NLU breaks the sentence down to make sense of it in the following manner: [Find]verb the [most popular]criteria [pizza place]category in [Vegas]location.

NLG: The Natural Language Generation part of the NLP is responsible for generating a response to the conversation based on context and intent.

Reinforcement Learning: It’s a type of machine learning that’s employed in an NLP to help Conversational AI to learn over time to become more accurate with its responses. The NLP’s goal is to become better at understanding responses by gathering feedback from past conversations.

TTS: In the last step in the process in which the response generated by the NLG is converted back to speech via an application — TTS, or Text to Speech and is output to the user.

In case of text input by the user, the text generated by the NLG is output back to the user.

Now that we’re aware of the technologies of Conversational AI, let’s look at the business advantages it has in store for you.

Business advantage of Conversational AI

Outlined below are some advantages you get by integrating Conversational AI in your interactions and workflows.

Enhanced Customer Experience

Customer Experience is the new battleground for businesses and Conversational AI is your weapon to succeed. Hyper personalization and flawless customer experience have become crucial to acquire and retain customers.

By leveraging customer data platforms, conversational AI can enhance customer experience by crafting meaningful conversations that reflect the brand value of your organization. You can now provide customer support round the clock with less or no agents.

Increase sales and profitability

Conversational AI can be used to drive sales. Chatbots with the help of AI can make sales decisions to sell items offering high profitability, and also up sell and cross sell items for your business. Further they can do this more efficiently over time.

Provide accessibility

Conversational AI Voice ChatBots can help in providing accessibility to specially abled individuals and elders having difficulty in reading text on screens.

Gain insights

Conversational AI’s goal is to get better at serving customers. It can find and recognize patterns that humans can’t. Now businesses can gain insights from the system that wasn’t possible before. This information can be leveraged to catapult you business to new heights of success.

Conclusion:

Conversational AI, with its human like interaction abilities and intelligence, has the power to transform businesses. From enhancing customer experiences and increasing sales, to providing accessibility and gaining invaluable insights, Conversational AI can be your strategic ally in an increasing competitive market.

At Agile Soft we use ML and cutting edge modern cloud technologies to give your business the advantage it needs. With an agile and customer centric culture we aim to bring the best in application development for you.

Book a consultation and begin a transformative journey with Agile Soft Systems on your side.