The growing AI industry and ever-evolving voice-enabled chatbots are causing similar changes in our world as Web 2.0. Voice apps are smart investments right now, as they will substitute many screen-based apps in the future. The number of voice-enabled devices and voice assistants is growing consistently and rapidly. The growth of the digital market for digital assistants is predicted to reach up to $3 billion by next year, 2020. So in this blog, let’s dig deep on this technology and find out their potential for the future.
What is a Voice Assistant?
A voice assistant is a digital assistant that uses voice recognition, speech synthesis, natural language processing (NLP) and other AI related capabilities to provide a service through a particular application.
Gartner predicts that over 30% percent of Customer Interactions will use voice. And that, by 2021, 25% percent of employee interactions with applications will be via voice. In the past, text was the only way to interact with an assistant or a chatbot. Now, voice has taken over.
How are they different from voice-enabled chatbots?
So when we use the term “conversational interface”, we often forget to acknowledge that there are two types of it. 1) Textual conversations, 2) Voice-enabled assistants. We use both the interfaces in conversational chatbots every day, but to know what to use when, we need to understand each of its use-cases.
Voice enabled chatbots are basically digital assistants that hear, perceive and respond to your voice inputs. For example, Siri and Google Alexa are voice assistants who read your voice input, analyze the task to be done and respond to you with relevant answers. These conversational interfaces understand natural language as they use NLP and NLU, and are trained to respond in natural language as well.
There are mainly two types of voice-enabled chatbots
The future of the Internet
Voice is an obvious easier method of communication for humans than texting. It’s informal, intuitive and quick. This provides a natural flow to process during the interactions, perhaps giving more mobility to employees. It’s predicted that by the year 2020, 50% of searches will be voice-based. About every 1 in 5 teens plan to purchase a voice-enabled device within the next year. Hence, the demand for voice chatbots is increasing, while also satisfying customer’s needs at the same time.
Modern organizations are increasingly deploying voice based chatbots and voice assistants. When you interact with a helpline, the pleasant voice input that you get to hear is a voice bot. Though the basic form has been around for a while, thanks to AI, bots have rapidly improved over the years.
Accenture’s Digital Consumer Survey in 2017 included 26,000 people from 26 countries. The survey found that 46% of US consumers are using “voice-enabled digital assistants”. These numbers were even higher in India and China — 55%.
If we break it down by age group, it shows more usage the younger users. More than 30% of teenagers between the ages of 14-17 use voice assistants regularly, with another 20% that have just started and 33% who seem interested. All in all, about 85% of teenagers are either using a chatbot voice assistant or at least plan to do so.
How are they a game-changer for businesses?
According to ComScore, consumers will make 200 billion voice searches every month by 2020. Businesses utilize AI to allow clients to determine issues and directly proceed with exchanges. AI chatbots can analyze your customers’ character, traits or any input the client provides. Chatbots can determine the date, place and the gadget data that the client is using. They can also determine whether the client is using the web or using an application to connect with the chatbot.
Chatbots also use various sources to gather and analyze client data. They measure factors such as client profile and inclination, the esteem of the organization, area, industry and the amount of cash spent in the previous year that gives the chatbot a bit more clarity about the client. All this data is commonly found on the CRM frameworks and can be fed to the chatbot easily.
They merge all this information retrieved to foresee client goals. They build up a comprehension of what the client needs by connecting every information cue from the interactions. It helps make the conversation more contextual and natural when the client connects with the chatbot. Users can proactively indulge in discussions with chatbots whenever they require assistance.
Voice activated chatbots take every message verbally stated by the client and enforce it through the conventional language models to understand what the client said. This is results in a personalized experience for the client.
Once the chatbot comprehends the client’s expectation, the reaction coordination pathway decides the right response, considering data from various learning bases and CRM frameworks. The chatbot will also decide proper follow-up activities like approaching the client for a secret word post-exchange.
Why do consumers prefer voice?
Voice bots have easy integrations with other channels and data services. They also act as personal assistants today. They assist in simple tasks such as google searches, setting alarms, reminders, read messages, make phone calls, tell you the weather conditions and even keep you entertained with scripted chit-chats.
A voice-enabled chatbot increases the possibility of providing more reliable data insights to the customers. It helps in giving the exact real-time. It also helps improvise the customer experience with your brand.
We’re all in a rush in today’s world, especially customers. They have no time or patience to deal with a company and queries. Hence, optimizing a quick way of providing instant assistance is every customer support team’s goal. While most of the companies cannot afford to hire a ton of live agents to instantly respond to any chats initiated by the customer, they substitute them to voice agents, who do the job error-free and don’t go heavy on the company’s pockets. They provide immediate, contextual responses and are also available 24*7.
Businesses today are extensively using voice apps to expand and reach out to a larger audience on a personal level! Hence, with the growing scope of conversational chatbots, even voice bots are going to get more normalized in business facilities.
Maintaining a good customer relationship is important to every company in today’s competitive world. The biggest challenge in engaging customers only via texts is that it requires time, patience and can get boring after a point, resulting in an ultimate customer fall out. A simple text often lacks personalization, context, and emotions. This also leads to a lot of misinterpretation of the conversation. Voice gives highly automated, intelligence-driven business communication.
Voice-enabled chatbots help us in providing better customer service and immediate assistance for daily tasks. Excluding this, you can also integrate it with various apps, channels or digital devices to help enhance your office productivity. Voice-bots let you operate hands-free. Your customer or even you could be typing out an email or having a meal and still be able to receive assistance from the digital assistant.
Voice chatbot examples include scheduling meetings with clients, write and send emails, set reminders, make calls and have Google searches and other research analytics ready to roll.
One thing about voice-bots, they can carry out a two-way conversation. Brands use voice-bots in their engagement and marketing strategies as this concept of talking to a robot is exciting and people are drawn towards it. It can create a positive sensation in people who interact with it. Adopting this technology makes way for a more integrated, pleasant and rich customer experience.
With the incredible capability of data mining and quantitative analysis of data, voice bots help in reducing the cost, and data analytics helps in detecting fraud. Voice-bots are a great way for businesses to use automation and connect with the world at the human level. Apart from this, voice-bots also specialize in emotion detection and possess multilingual qualities to accustom to every business need.
Half of all searches will be voice searches by 2020. The voice market will grow from $1.6 billion in 2015 to $15.8 billion in 2021.
- Forbes article on Voice Chatbots.
These are some of the reasons behind the expected growth of voice assistants.
How are businesses going to benefit from this?
In a world of 4G and fiber broadband, why are we still clinging onto text interfaces in unsuitable and inconvenient contexts? Imagine you’re multitasking; you're driving yourself to the local food market and you want to quickly add off those few missed out items that you might forget about later, what are you going to do?
Are you going to pull over and type out all those items one by one? Or would you rather prefer saying them out loud to your bot? Chatbots represent the return of the command line interface- call and response- so we expect quick, real-time communication.
With the help of NLP, the two-way contextual conversations are now making a variety of everyday work fast and easy to complete. Through these bots, you can receive massive utility value for tiny input.
Voice bots are not only transforming our personal lives but will be able to assist and automate our businesses as well. These on-demand assistants make voice conversations between humans more productive while making our concentration-time better. There will come a time when we’ll be commanding help through every device we use, not just our smartphones. You can book follow-up meetings, share files mid-meetings through voice commands, send summary notes, and much more without the need of typing it out, waiting for the bot to recollect the data, and all that hustle. Voice-activated digital assistants are available on desktop computers, as well as smartphones today.
Customer acquisition & support with a Voice Assistant
Imagine upcoming e-commerce or a retail store focusing on customer acquisition without compromising on customer support or experience. The store drives this initiative through its newly launched mobile app on iOS and Android with the goal of increasing app installations.
One obvious option available is to employ additional customer support personnel to cater to the increased user traffic. The other option would be to leverage Siri or Google Assistant to help out with providing the required service. But there is a third option that is far more cost-effective and meaningful as compared to the other two.
Fun Fact: 55% of teenagers are using voice search daily basis.
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Engati allows organizations to build voice assistants for a variety of use cases across industries. The voice assistant can be integrated with the mobile app on both iOS and Android operating systems. The Assistant has the capability to mimic a customer support personnel or a user behaviour.
As a user of the mobile app, one can leverage the assistant to search for products or services, get information on a product or a service, get real-time information on order status, provide information on both general or specific inquiries, and get guidance on the next steps to be taken.
5 Key benefits that demonstrate Engati is a leader in the Voice Assistant space for mobile apps
Voice Assistants like Google Home, Alexa, and Siri are doing a great job at personalizing technology at home. In fact, Amazon is currently working on a technology that will make you talk to your microwave. Who knows, we could be talking to the Uber or Ola app so that it books a cab for us. On the enterprise front, Microsoft is working with Alexa to make people use its Office suite. Further, their recent release is a platform that helps companies build workplace skills using Cortana.
In a similar fashion, Engati helps you build a Voice Assistant for your business. This way your customers can simply talk to the bot within your mobile app and to find solutions.
Engati voice assistants can also be customized to integrate with other enterprise systems like Google Sheets, Salesforce, etc., Engati voice assistants can also retrieve and save information via REST, SOAP APIs. Also, it is easy, fast, and effective and saves the customer a significant amount of time and effort.
Voice Assistants today are specific to the operating software. Siri is specific to iOS and Google Assistant is specific to Android. With Engati, one can build a Voice Assistant that works on both of these operating systems and requires minimal coding. So, an organization need not invest heavily on additional engineers to build voice assistants for their mobile apps.
When you build a voice or a chatbot with Engati, you get to integrate it with FAQs, Entities, Contextual Conversations, Synonyms, Intent, and a whole variety of other AI-based features. These advanced AI and natural language capabilities are native to the platform and allow you to leverage them for your bots in a plug-and-play fashion.
You can even train your chatbot by simply uploading a document with your information for the bot to parse. Thanks to our DocuSense technology, your Engati bot will pull the information directly from this document and use it to answer questions.
Building a DIY Voice Assistant for a mobile app requires an additional investment in engineering, infrastructure, and learning abilities. With Engati, one can build voice assistants and integrate them with the apps quickly.
Engati is a multilingual chatbot platform that supports 50+ international languages. To name a few of them, it supports English, Spanish, Urdu, Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, and more. Moreover, the Voice Assistant can also be customized for placement within the app, fitting the visual design of the app and building the intelligence as per business goals.
As of 2019, Amazon’s Alexa was supported on around 60,000 different smart home devices around the world, providing an excellent example of just how popular the software has become.
- Statista report on Digital Voice Assistants.
Wrapping up
To build yourself a voice assistant quick and easy for your business- check out our chatbot features!
Thanks for reading. Happy botting!
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