Conversational AI Trends In 2021
Artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies played a key role in 2020, especially in overcoming or adapting to the limitations and challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Digital marketing was given prominence as people were forced indoors and e-commerce saw a surge in traffic. Essential services like healthcare had to be made more accessible to people, especially with the use of digital tools and software.
In terms of human resources, AI service providers were able to enhance tasks like training, employee information updates, and onboarding with the use of AI.
While the world adapted to the implementation of AI, fuelled by a pandemic in 2020, the role of AI is bound to be even more significant in 2021, as the world better adapts to the pandemic and the true impact of nation-wide lockdowns and changes in the way businesses operate is felt across industries.
Conversational AI will, without a doubt, play a crucial role in this regard. Simply put, conversational AI are technologies that people can talk to. Chatbots and voice assistants are examples of conversational AI that many are familiar with. The concept uses large volumes of data as well as subsets of AI like machine learning and natural language processing to imitate human interactions.
Considering the role of conversational AI in 2021, these are the top trends in 2021 that conversational AI developers should look out for.
- Smarter Chatbots
Chatbot technology has been embraced by organizations across the world as they enable businesses to offer better customer service and interaction without having to dedicate as many human resources to the task. In addition to receiving customer complaints and feedback, chatbots can also make recommendations and receive customer queries.
This year, chatbots are expected to be smarter than ever before due to the use of advanced natural language understanding (NLU). NLU is a subset of natural language processing (NLP) and enables machines to understand the overall context and meaning of natural language. It goes beyond the literal definition of text and aims at understanding written and spoken language in the same way a human would.
Advancements in NLU are expected in 2021 and these developments will lead to smarter chatbot technology. This trend is one that is especially important to an AI app development company that specializes in chatbots and similar conversational AI applications.
- Scalability
The impact of COVID-19 usually takes a negative tone, but it is fair to say that the pandemic accelerated e-commerce growth in 2020. With the temporary closure of brick and mortar establishments due to the pandemic and permanent closure of some brick and mortar establishments due to financial losses, people around the globe turned to e-commerce outlets.
Given how unexpected the pandemic was, several businesses failed to make the right investments to support scalability and found that their virtual agents and similar tools were insufficient to meet the increased demand they were facing.
Due to this, the scaling up of conversational AI will be a key trend in 2021, and developers are expected to consider current capacity as well as spikes in customer interactions when integrating AI technologies to enhance business operations.
- Employee Efficiency
Employees were faced with various challenges in 2020. On the one hand, jobs in several industries were at risk, and many faced salary cuts or job losses. On the other hand, employees were expected to meet targets and carry out tasks despite the limitations set by the pandemic. Working from home became the norm and employees had to keep productivity levels up despite the various ways in which the impact of the pandemic was felt.
In 2021, employees will find that chatbots and conversational AI will carry out even more customer service tasks, thus enabling a business to focus its human resources on other functions and processes. The use of internal virtual agents will also be of assistance to customer service agents and the combination of conversational AI and human customer service representatives will result in increased efficiency as well as increased customer satisfaction.
This too is a trend conversational AI trend organizations should look out for in 2021.
