Artificial Intelligence Archives – Concerto https://www.concerto.ai/category/artificial-intelligence/ Making human like free form conversations a reality Wed, 16 Feb 2022 10:26:57 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.5 https://www.concerto.ai/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/concerto-icon-150x150.png Artificial Intelligence Archives – Concerto https://www.concerto.ai/category/artificial-intelligence/ 32 32 Cut costs with AI assistants-Power your way through the pa… https://www.concerto.ai/cut-costs-with-ai-assistants-power-your-way-through-the-pandemic/ Thu, 03 Feb 2022 14:39:59 +0000 https://www.concerto.ai/?p=11795 Cut costs with AI assistants – Power your way through the pandemic Artificial Intelligence, by far the most hyped technology in recent times, has demonstrated its worth to marketers, sales professionals, as well as businesses across industries. And not surprisingly, the demand for conversational AI has snowballed since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Here […]

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Cut costs with AI assistants - Power
your way through the pandemic

Artificial Intelligence, by far the most hyped technology in recent times, has demonstrated its worth to marketers, sales professionals, as well as businesses across industries. And not surprisingly, the demand for conversational AI has snowballed since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Here is a glimpse into the many ways in which this technology has held the business world together in these tough times. Pattern your business on these to be more economical while achieving your quarterly and annual goals.

Impact of the pandemic
on the chatbot industry

While the world buckled under the pressure of a novel virus, automation became the ray of hope for many industries. It demonstrated the dire need for digital transformation. Businesses had to build up their digital infrastructure to match the shifting client demands.

Customers today are impatient. A staggering 82% of them expect immediate response to their queries from firms. With global lockdowns and workspace restrictions directly affecting workforce availability, enterprises are compelled to streamline their operations. Customer service departments of most organizations struggle to respond to individual consumers, let alone handle issues in a timely manner, if not for chatbots. Automation with intelligent assistants has become critical to solve many organizational problems and reduce losses.

Thanks to artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing, chatbots are now increasingly user friendly, helping businesses automate routine work. A good 80% of consumers across industries prefer chatbots and report positive experiences. What's more, commercial chatbots have broadened their applications and are now being used to assist marketing efforts and drive sales.

Advantages of chatbots for customers

The ability to provide excellent customer service can make or break a business. Responsiveness to queries is especially critical for companies with a web presence. The goal of AI-powered chatbots, like that of customer care representatives, is to assist users and increase customer happiness.

01

24/7 Availability

Customers won't have to spam you with support emails or wait for live agents if you have chatbots for your website and other primary channels. Business chatbots powered by AI are not limited to regular working hours. Often linked to a comprehensive knowledge base, they provide customers with ready-to-use responses. If a situation gets too complicated for the bot to handle, it escalates the issue to appropriate authorities.

02

Instant Query Resolution

Nobody likes waiting for extended periods of time, especially on the internet. If you rely only on live personnel to handle high-volume support calls, delays are unavoidable. And if the problem persists, it will increase your churn. Chatbots are the ideal solution to this problem as they can rapidly respond to online consumers. Additionally, in case of unexpected issues, they can collect and share user details with agents for efficient inquiry response. This is significantly more effective than relying on email or live agents for assistance.

03

Easy Orders

A well-designed appointment booking chatbot can let customers schedule appointments at any time of the day. For small businesses such as salons, spas, med spas, medical and dental clinics, hospitals, veterinary clinics, and several other such businesses, every appointment is an opportunity to satisfy a customer and increase revenue. Losing customers on account of inability to help them with appointment booking at a time of their convenience is detrimental to the business.

As for small businesses that sell products, the ability to provide product information round the clock to customers instantly and automatedly on conversational channels like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger significantly improves business outcomes. In many cases, businesses can also take orders on conversational channels and chatbots. Chatbots have simplified the previously tedious and time-consuming process of purchasing or booking appointments through chat applications.

Along with appointment bookings, chatbots help simplify a slew of processes for consumers such as information access, order tracking and cancellation, booking reschedule, product purchase and return, and receiving prompt reimbursements.

04

Easy Accessibility

UX designers realized how difficult it might be for some users to navigate websites. They may mix up labels and keep going back and forth between the same pages before giving up. And for many firms, this could be a huge problem since they risk losing those customers.

Chatbots are programmed to stay on every page of a website and to call for user attention with rich interactions. They are often the first point of contact for customers on mobile apps. Further, chatbots are built to always be available. As a result, whether your target audience spends the majority of their time on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, or other in-app messengers, they will be able to reach out to you with minimal effort.

05

Personalized Conversations

Chatbots can provide hyper-personalization to users in a way that may not be possible with website visitors or email lists. It employs historical data, such as preferences and previous purchases to direct  conversations. This can be immensely useful both for the customers and businesses to make decisions.

Advantages of Chatbots For Businesses

In addition to aiding end-users or consumers, chatbots give a lot of value to businesses.

01

Reduced Customer Service Costs

This is one of the most fundamental, yet crucial, advantages of chatbots. By deploying conversational systems, businesses can save up to 30%. Although not advanced enough to replace your customer support team, virtual assistants can significantly lower costs on 3 levels: salaries, training, and infrastructure.

02

Improved Lead Generation

Chatbots are designed to collect data from potential customers and deliver personalized messaging. A lead generation chatbot advances the client experience by increasing interest in products and services. They can be used to offer discounts and, to some extent, persuade prospects to buy, as well as to aid in the building of relationships with prospects.

AI assistants can employ modules like a pre-programmed quiz to entice users to fill out a form and generate leads, resulting in higher conversion rates.

03

Improved Customer Engagement

Chatbots can assist organizations to take client engagement to new heights. Driven by the insights from user data, the information deployed by the conversational AI can be made more appropriate and engaging. Furthermore, bots provide consistent responses, which helps you avoid sharing irrelevant information. Customers will stay longer on your website and continue the conversation if you provide meaningful and timely responses. Thus chatbots facilitate improved product visibility and navigation across your website.

04

Monitor Consumer Data to Gain Insights

By monitoring user data, chatbots are effective tools to track purchasing trends and to analyze consumer behavior. This information can assist businesses in marketing their products in new ways and expanding their reach. Bots can also be used to collect feedback via simple questions in order to improve products or optimize websites.

05

Devise a Conversational Marketing Strategy

Chatbots can assist organizations to take client engagement to new heights. Driven by the insights from user data, the information deployed by the conversational AI can be made more appropriate and engaging. Furthermore, bots provide consistent responses, which helps you avoid sharing irrelevant information. Customers will stay longer on your website and continue the conversation if you provide meaningful and timely responses. Thus chatbots facilitate improved product visibility and navigation across your website.

06

Balance Automation with Human intervention

Brands can provide seamless customer care by combining AI technology with human interactions. Complex queries that require in-depth discussion can be handled by live chat professionals, while chatbots provide real-time responses, thus offering customers the greatest hybrid experience. Brands may use the combination of live chat and chatbot to communicate with customers intelligently all day, every day.

It is critical for any firm to build and sustain a healthy conversation with its clients in order to survive the pandemic. Thus the benefits of a chatbot are unrivalled: quick inquiry response for customers, filtered help inquiries for customer service employees, and rising client engagement for your business. Businesses cannot afford to lose another consumer in the aftermath of cutthroat competition that COVID-19 has brought in. So, when operators can no longer handle the inundation of messages, chatbots become the logical solution where profitability and long-term growth are the primary goals. At Concetro.ai, we build AI assistants that can help you power through the new found challenges of these uncertain times. Wondering how to get started? Ask us for a demo!

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]]> Why Intelligent Assistants Will Replace Chatbots https://www.concerto.ai/why-intelligent-assistants-will-replace-chatbots/ Tue, 21 Dec 2021 10:34:11 +0000 https://stage.concerto.ai/?p=10592 Why Intelligent Assistants Will Replace Chatbots There is a lot of confusion in the world of tools for human-machine interaction and conversational systems today. Monikers like Bots, Chatbots, Virtual Assistants, Conversational Agents, and Intelligent Assistants are bandied about to suit the marketing messages and brand positioning sometimes. Chatbots were mostly deployed to engage users on […]

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Why Intelligent Assistants Will Replace Chatbots

There is a lot of confusion in the world of tools for human-machine interaction and conversational systems today. Monikers like Bots, Chatbots, Virtual Assistants, Conversational Agents, and Intelligent Assistants are bandied about to suit the marketing messages and brand positioning sometimes.

Chatbots were mostly deployed to engage users on messaging apps and on websites through chat windows for customer support, lead generation, form filling, guided actions, and so on. And intelligent assistants like Google Assistant, Siri, or Amazon Alexa that we use as personal assistants originated with a different goal. However, the distinction between chatbots and intelligent assistants is becoming ambiguous as these terms are being used interchangeably. In fact, they are quite different from each other in the way they imagine a natural human interaction, their design principles, the technologies they use, and the way we experience them.

One key difference between chatbots and intelligent assistants
is that chatbots were designed for the ‘typing-user’ while intelligent assistants
focused on the ‘speaking-user’.

Advancements in AI and natural language understanding (NLU) technologies are critical factors behind the growing intelligence in intelligent assistants. They have made ‘voice’ the next wave of human-machine interaction after text, GUI, and touch. Voice is quickly gaining acceptance as the preferred mode of interaction for many smartphone users, especially with the millennial and post millennial generation. It is sure to gain more ground as natural conversation based tools such as intelligent assistants present us with easier, faster, frictionless, and more compelling experiences.

Since chatbots were primarily designed for the typing user, they were geared towards giving users a break from laborious typing. A longer conversation with many dialog turns was often preferred over requiring users to type a long sentence. For example, a banking chatbot would not ask an open question like ‘How can I help you today?’, but is likely to ask ‘Are you looking for help with a savings account, investment, loan, or a credit card?’

Chatbots are typically scripted decision trees with pre-determined rule-based paths. They are intent on moving the ‘conversation’ from one state to the next. They do not cede conversation control during the entire interaction. Given the nature of the technology, we are not allowed to ask questions outside the state/context.

In fact, in most cases, chatbots do all the ‘asking’ and
we are expected to just respond to them.

Over a period of time, it can become unwieldy and awkward to support any interaction that requires a longer, deeper, and more complex decision tree. They were generally successful when the focus was on customer support with a finite scope or the goal was to cut costs of running a manual customer service center. In many cases, they were the only way for customers to reach a company and in such cases they did not have to compete for the user’s attention. Chatbots on messaging apps had some value as they allowed users to seek resolution for issues round the clock, without having to leave the native environment.

On the other hand, intelligent assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant were primarily designed for the ‘speaking-user’ on smartphones and smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home. Our conversation style is more natural when we speak vs. when we type. Hence, intelligent assistants were designed to understand our natural language interactions. They use advanced AI technologies to recognize, understand, and process voice and text based natural conversations with high accuracy. They are rapidly moving beyond executing specific commands and smart home automation tasks to attract and engage us in a free-form conversation that feels natural. Intelligent assistants work across devices. They are focused on providing a compelling, enjoyable, and engaging user experience. Users have no compulsion to use Intelligent Assistants and hence they have to be designed to wow the user. They are flexible to share conversation control with the users.

Since they rely on technologies like deep Q&A, they can handle a wide range of questions without requiring an unwieldy pre-configured decision tree. For example, Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant can answer a wide range of questions from the web in natural language. Above all, intelligent assistants can learn and get better with experience. They resolve complex questions swiftly and guide users to their goals with ease.

Chatbots have been proliferating over the last 6–7 years and have a large installed base. Given that intelligent assistants can perform a range of complex sets of tasks for users, can we upgrade existing chatbots to intelligent assistants?

It’s not going to be easy to repurpose chatbots to higher-order,
mixed initiative conversations because of fundamental architectural differences between them.
The truth is that though chatbots are getting more intelligent, many of them
still have a lot of hard-coded rules.

Whatever you call your chosen conversational tool, it is important that you architect your assistant on the right platform using advanced AI technologies so that your tool design aligns with your business goals and is future proof.

Make no mistake, intelligent assistants like Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and Cortana will be everywhere — on your office desk, in your car, by your bedside, in your phones, in your conference rooms, in malls, in stores, everywhere. Users interacting with these assistants will expect the same level of natural human-like interactions with your apps that the native assistants allow users to experience.

As voice users engage with intelligent assistants with increasing satisfaction and efficiency, there will be significant market adoption for them. The day is not far off when intelligent assistants are not just one of the many options for interaction with a smart device but the preferred one.

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]]> One Voice To Answer Your Questions In The Automation Age https://www.concerto.ai/one-voice-to-answer-your-questions/ Tue, 21 Dec 2021 07:26:27 +0000 https://stage.concerto.ai/?p=10432 One Voice To Answer Your Questions AI can be anywhere — as scary as that statement sounds, think of the amazing possibilities. Imagine, you are stuck in a traffic jam and suddenly you feel like listening to that one song you don’t have on your phone. Simply ask your car to play it. You are […]

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One Voice To Answer Your Questions

AI can be anywhere — as scary as that statement sounds, think of the amazing possibilities. Imagine, you are stuck in a traffic jam and suddenly you feel like listening to that one song you don’t have on your phone. Simply ask your car to play it. You are using your washer for the first time and you realize you don't know anything about washing your jeans, “Hey Washer! how do I wash jeans?” Can’t seem to find your phone under the sheets? Just roar, “Alexa, where’s my phone?”

The era of artificial intelligence has arrived and it is set to transform the way humans interact with the machine. In other words, AI will be omnipresent in the digital universe. The way we interact with computers has been evolving — from desktops and computers, to smartphones and smart devices. The user interface went through a massive makeover over the years. From input-output devices like keyboard and mouse, to touchscreens, and now, the third form of computing, voice interface.

With the introduction of voice assistants and smart devices, soon users will be able to interact with any digital device at the comfort of their homes. We are already living in a world where it is possible to ask our fridge to order some eggs; command our smart devices to play music, switch off the lights, call a friend, or simply play an interesting game, all without lifting a finger. And this technology is going to get better in the coming years.

Call it having a conversation with an artificial intelligence, asking it to complete some action or helping you out, it all boils down to one simple aspect of using AI: Question Answering. You ask a question and the bot answers.

Voice assistants like Siri and Ok Google made this possible for smartphone users, then Amazon introduced Alexa and smart speakers like Echo. Google and Apple soon followed the smart speaker race and now, every electronic giant is trying to get their hands on this piece of technology. Soon we’ll be able to use these assistants in every electronic device out there.

Where will it work?

To understand this concept, take Google as an example. Every single search query is basically a question typed by a user. Now imagine if you could simply ask those questions without the hassle of opening your internet browser and typing it in.

We believe that in the near future, these voice assistants will be able to answer all kinds of questions related to our day to day lives.

Imagine a scenario where you wish to buy a new car. You visit a showroom and the first thing you do is talk to a sales executive. You may have hundreds of questions in your mind, but the person standing in front of you may not have all the answers.

Now imagine the same situation with a smart speaker fitted in the car you wish to buy; you enter the car, get a feel of the interiors, and ask your AI buddy whatever comes to your mind. This AI application inside your future car won’t need to go through the brochure or a manual to answer your questions. Think of how much simpler shopping will become if every retail store had an AI assistant present to answer all your product related queries.

Building the right application
for basketball fans

The kind of questions these assistants get will always depend on the users. Foodies will want to know the best restaurants around them or what new recipes they can try, cinema lovers will want to know the showtimes of upcoming films, and sports fans will keep going back to their favourite applications to know the scores or schedule of their favourite teams.

Keeping such sports fans in mind, we built a skill (voice application on Amazon’s Alexa) for NBA fans. Unlike the existing skills, Slam Dunk, our skill, answers all your questions about all thirty NBA teams. Whether you wish to know the scores, schedule or standings, Slam Dunk answers it all. But the fun doesn’t stop there. Every hardcore basketball fan has a favorite team, and we know how to pamper these fans.

Once you open Slam Dunk on your Echo, we will ask you your name and your favourite NBA team. From that point onwards, whenever you use the skill, you’ll be greeted by us and the latest match results of your beloved NBA team. But we won’t restrict you to one team only. If you wish to know the scores, upcoming games or leaderboard standings or any other 29 teams, just ask Slam Dunk. These are just some interesting features of this skill, enable it on your device and try it out.

This is just one application we built. If you wish to know more about what we do at Concerto.ai, stay tuned follow us. We plan to keep our readers informed about the latest updates in the world of AI and assistants.

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