What Is Conversational AI?

People may rely heavily on technology for efficiency and accuracy but continue to seek human connection and relationships. Personalised marketing strategies, for instance, are successful for this reason. The customer feels like the business is catering specifically to their needs.

The need for the relationship between a customer and a business to feel more human also applies to communication and interactions with the company. An AI app development company, for instance, will work hard to develop chatbots that sound human, giving customers the sense that they are talking with an employee of the company and not a machine.

This is where conversational artificial intelligence or conversational AI comes in. Enabling machines to simulate real conversations, conversational AI is often used by businesses to automate customer-facing touchpoints. This can be on the business website or application, voice assistants, or social media.

The work done by conversational AI developers goes beyond chatbots and is not limited to text-based interactions. The technology behind conversational AI is constantly improving, meaning that an AI app development company can always offer clients something new. An AI app development company need not limit their services to the retail industry either, as industries from education to healthcare and finance can benefit greatly from the technology.

How It Works?

The process behind conversational AI can be broken down into three stages. These are Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Natural Language Processing (NLP) or Natural Language Understanding (NLU), and Text-To-Speech (TTS).

The process starts with the customer asking the application a question. If this is in audio format, the ASR stage converts the audio to text. This process involves feature extraction, an acoustic model, decoder, and a language model.

The question then goes to the NLP or NLU stage, where it is interpreted and the machine generates a response. Machine translation, query search, autocorrect, visual search, and search ranking are some of the elements relevant to this stage.

The text is then converted to audio for the user and this is the TTS stage. Speech synthesis and voice encoder are part of this stage.

AI development services make use of this basic structure when developing conversational AI applications for clients. There are also different tools as well as datasets that can be used by conversational AI developers to improve the efficiency of their application.

Why It Works?

Organisations across industries use conversational AI to engage customers and the use of the technology has been impressive over the years. Businesses invest heavily in AI development services because they are aware of the benefits of conversational AI.

One of the main reasons the technology works is because of its instant response rate. If a potential customer wishes to inquire about a product, they need not wait until the store is open for business or spend a frustrating amount of time on a customer service hotline. Instead, they can approach the business at any time of the day and expect a response almost immediately.

When a customer receives a quick response to a query, they have a positive experience, which impacts brand image and customer loyalty. Instant response rates also increase the likelihood of a lead being converted to a customer.

A business can also enlist the services of an AI app development company to give customers the method of communication they prefer. Today, rarely will a customer call or email a business about a product. We are so used to messaging platforms, especially on social media, that our preference for messaging extends to our role as customers.

Having an easily accessible live chat service on a website or mobile application makes it easier and more convenient for customers to contact a business.

While there are several other reasons why the technology works, scalability is a benefit that stands out. With a customer service hotline, there is a limit to the number of calls a team can handle at any given time. A conversational AI bot can handle large volumes of queries with no issue and has the ability to adjust to sudden spikes of customer queries.

Conversational AI developers use large quantities of data to improve the conversations carried out between customers and machines. The technology keeps improving to ensure these conversations are engaging and flow naturally.

Due to this, customers do not feel like they are talking to a machine. The conversational qualities of the technology give customers the impression that they are talking to a real person, which is why businesses invest in conversational AI.