What is Conversational AI?

Conversational AI is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that enables machines to interact with humans in natural language. It combines machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to enable computers to understand, interpret, and respond to human input. This technology has been used in customer service applications for many years, but its potential is much greater than just helping customers find answers quickly.

Machine learning is a branch of AI that focuses on the development of computer programs that can learn from data without being explicitly programmed. Machine learning algorithms use statistical techniques to identify patterns in large datasets and make predictions or decisions based on those patterns. Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of AI that deals with understanding and generating human-readable text or speech. NLP systems are designed to process large amounts of unstructured data, such as text or audio recordings, extract meaningful information from it, and generate appropriate responses. When combined together, these two technologies form the basis for conversational AI systems.

Conversational AI has become increasingly popular over the past few years due to its ability to provide personalized customer experiences at scale. For example, chatbots powered by conversational AI can be used by companies to automate customer service tasks such as answering frequently asked questions or providing product recommendations, deflecting upwards of thousands of tickets that would require a human to answer. By leveraging machine learning algorithms and NLP models, these chatbots can understand user intent and provide accurate responses in real-time without any manual intervention required from customer service agents. Additionally, conversational AI can also be used for more complex tasks such as lead qualification or sales automation by understanding user input and providing tailored advice accordingly.

The Difference Between Traditional Chatbots and Conversational AI Chatbots

It’s worth noting here that not all chatbots are created equal. If you have had negative experiences with bots in the past that seemed overly formulaic and slow, you’re not alone. Traditional chatbots are limited in their functionality because of their simplistic, rule-based systems. Traditional chatbots follow rigid structures that have been pre-defined and find it very difficult to understand regular queries that don’t fit into these patterns. 

Because of the nearly infinite variability in terms of customer inquiry, it is very difficult to scale these bots to anything more significant than their current use. You can think of them as simple, robotic chatbots. By contrast, conversational AI chatbots are advanced systems capable of understanding human conversations. Instead of following a pre-defined pattern, these bots can analyze user intent from human input and develop custom solutions for each and every interaction.

Benefits of Conversational AI and Automation on Businesses

Conversational AI and automation are revolutionizing the way businesses interact with their customers. By leveraging the power of artificial intelligence, companies can create meaningful customer experiences and interactions that break language barriers, save time and resources, create content tailored to their audience, work around the clock and across all channels, improve conversations with customers, automate mundane tasks, and more. 

Here are some of its many benefits:

Breaking language barriers

These days, most businesses rely on a digital presence to help grow their business. As your organization expands to global markets, the likelihood that you will begin receiving visitors whose first language is different from your own increases. Conversational AI overcomes the language barrier by automatically enabling you and your team to converse with customers from all over the world in any language. 

Save time and resources

Customers are always contacting your business with questions. Solving customer problems manually is taking up valuable time, money, and effort that could be better spent on higher strategic tasks. 

Create content tailored to your audience

Because Conversational AI is designed with machine learning, its language processing and analytical skills increase with every single interaction. This means that it can get to know your customers, remember their preferences, and cater to what they find engaging. 

Work around the clock and across all channels

Unlike humans, AI doesn’t need rest or sleep and doesn’t need to abide by ordinary working hours. You can use conversational AI systems to ensure that your customers can always connect with you and get access to the support they need, no matter when or where they need it.

Improve conversations with customers

Conversational AI enables you to understand and learn customer preferences on a deeper level than traditional surveys or simple purchase tracking. The system’s ability to understand the intent of the customer means that you can make far more relevant and impactful product recommendations than ever before.