With the technically growing era, Conversational AI has become ubiquitous. It is growing from business to entertainment. Engineers are working hard to establish a successful conversation between computers and humans; they try to make interaction as real /human-like as possible. Of course, we usually do some computer-based interaction like playing with chatbots, talking with virtual assistants like 'Alexa,' responding to automated emails. But did you know what's happening behind the scenes? Who gives the flow to our Conversation? Machines do intent classification to interpret what is being said, search for a suitable response, and reply naturally and comprehensively. 

What is Conversational AI?

Conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a technology that facilitates human-computer Conversation effectively, accurately and creates a human-like interaction platform. It combines various technologies, including machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), deep learning, and contextual awareness. These technologies help chatbots, virtual assistants, and robots to recognize our inputted speech, understand our intent, and interact like a human. A crucial part of Conversation AI is to integrate personalization, context, and relevance within the human-computer Conversation.

Why is Conversational AI becoming so critical today?

Conversational AI is widespread in industries from customer service or marketing to security. These brilliant programs assist businesses in connecting with audiences in never-before-seen ways. Companies use conversational AI to enhance marketing, improve sales, and increase social engagement. In addition, the independence of Conversational AI from manually written scripts makes every interaction unique and relevant and reduces effort and resolution time. 

With technological advancement, conversational AI is emerging in home automation, automobiles, marketing, advertising, and e-learning. 

Why are businesses investing in conversational AI?

A considerable investment is observed in conversational AI for many reasons:

Delivered on Customer Service Promise

Businesses are changing their priorities and lining down towards the customer experience to stay up in the race. They are creating a more customer-centric experience to optimize their customer service promises with the help of Conversational AI. Conversational AI increases the first contact resolution (FCR) and customer satisfaction scores by inscribing live agent assistance and self-services with sentiment analysis.

Personalized Conversation at Scale

Today, every customer expects a world-class experience from organizations. As a result, businesses use Conversational AI to deliver a highly personalized customer conversation at scale across various channels and provide them a seamless experience.

How Does it Work?

Conversational AI is a set of technologies including NLP, AI, and ML to process the human-machine conversation. Natural language processing(NLP) is an umbrella term that includes two different categories Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG). NLU helps the computers to understand the intent of the customer's unstandardized speech. Instead of keyword matching or dictionary searching, NLU focuses on human intentions or speech context. It enables the machine to understand incorrect spellings, short-forms, and grammatical mistakes. Once the customer's intent is recognized, Artificial intelligence (AI) predicts communication patterns from this data. Machine Learning (ML) plays a significant role in response detection. It enhances the accuracy and performance of Conversational AI by teaching the appropriate responses. Lastly, NLG provides an accurate answer to the customer in a more human-like language.

How does Conversational AI benefit Businesses?

Conversational AI acts as a sales enhancer for various firms. It benefits businesses in many ways beginning from demand generation to customer service. You can see how companies depend on conversational AI to drive value.

Optimize Customer Service

Knowingly or unknowingly, conversational AI becomes an integral part of our business life. Every customer wants a helping assistant, fast response, and accurate solutions. Businesses are technically using chatbots and voice bot assistants to fulfill customers' demands. Companies compete in technology by applying conversational AI, NLP, and ML to understand human speech, language, and emotions. As a result, they provide an impressionable personalized experience to their customers. 

Drive Marketing and Sales efforts

Businesses are enriched with the competitive advantage of Conversational AI. It drives a more significant impact on marketing, sales, and customers with higher expectations. AI-based solutions understand a buyer's personality from its roles and social media preferences. To improve conversion, highly relevant content can be offered to the customers depending on their personality. An interaction can be built by accommodating customers' intent, emotions, and sentiments.

What are the main Challenges in Conversational AI?

Highly advanced and improved technology is required to overcome various challenges Conversational AI faces. As a result, data scientists are working tirelessly to improve Conversational AI every day. 

Constantly Changing Communication

Human communication is not standardized and static—various factors such as accents, emojis, languages, dialects, and sarcasm influence human-machine communication. Therefore, conversational AI systems need to keep updated with human communication and social trends.

Security and Privacy

Customer confidentiality is the most critical factor that every firm should respect. Conversational AI bots should be capable of keeping all sensitive and personal details hidden. In addition, they should be designed with a robust security system to respect customers' emotions. 

To Wrap Up

Businesses consider conversational AI a critical element of a rapidly growing competitive customer service strategy. Conversational AI is consistently evolving to fulfill customer needs, and AI implementations are working as fuel to this growth. It helps enterprises to deliver high-level customer service consistently. Conversational AI connects people and machines from automated self-service to live bot assistance across vast networks. Our expectations and capabilities are growing with the increase in demands of customer services, and conversational AI is fueling our future digital transformations. 

Let's connect with Indika to learn more about how you can facilitate Conversational AI now!