Conversational AI: The Technology Empowering Businesses with Better User Understanding

From decades ago, the concept of conversational AI has been existing, however, it was not broadly ever talked about. In the last few years, its usage has grown rapidly mostly across the business sectors. Conversational AI is a form of artificial intelligence, which is used to generate automated messaging and speech-enabled applications for a better client experience. Conversational AI can help in changing the dynamic of an organization by providing context-sensitive, personalized, and automated conversations with the customers, clients, business partners, and employees beyond time-zone, geographies, and culture.

The important thing to know about conversational AI is that it is not a single process, it runs with a combination of different technologies. Mostly the technologies which are included in conversational AI are as follows:

• Automated Speech Recognition
• Natural Language Processing
• Machine Learning
• Contextual –Awareness
• Natural Language Understanding
• Deep Learning

With the collaboration of all these technologies, conversational AI is able to provide real-time interaction between a human being and a machine such as computers, smartphones, and other gadgets.

What is the Difference between Conversational AI and Chatbots?

Usually, people get confused with chatbots and conversational AI. Generally, chatbots share one common application of conversational AI, i.e. providing an immediate, convenient, and easy response to the customers’ need. However, all chatbots do not use conversational AI. Some key differences are as follows:

• Conversational AI is powered by deep learning which promotes easy scalability. Therefore it can understand the number of ways a user can ask questions. However, chatbots usually deliver keyword-driven answers based on manually-crafted rules.
• Moreover, conversational AI learns from real interactions. It can understand the short-forms and the spelling mistakes performed by the user, while chatbots need explicit training to understand every single command.
• In the case of conversational AI, it is easy to retrain with historical data while in chatbots, it is quite difficult to scale up and the organizations have to update rules explicitly.

What are the Major Applications of Conversational AI?

Majorly, Conversational AI possesses a wide variety of applications for organizations belonging to different sectors. Some of them are as follows:

• Enhancing Customer Engagement- Conversational AI helps in delivering exact information relevant to the customers’ behavior, their journey, and the signals they are inputting. This helps to reduce the frustration of customers for repeating questions and uplifts the revenue of the company by providing satisfactory and quick responses.
• Improving Product Accessibility- Most organizations depend upon conversational AI to provide their customers with a comprehensive experience. By leveraging natural language processing and natural language understanding, it can automatically translate the text into speech and deliver an effective response. This enables businesses to promote their product better among clients or customers having disabilities.
• Giving an Automatic Resolution to Common FAQs- In many businesses there are some common FAQs that cover around 50% of the total consumer services. A powerful conversational AI can easily interpret the different ways of asking the same question by the customers. This enhanced facility helps users to get instant responses.

What are the Main Challenges of Conversational AI?

As conversational AI includes various technologies, there exist many threats and challenges in delivering the process. These challenges can be overcomed with the help of more advanced technologies. Some main challenges are discussed below:

• The conversational AI application should be designed with high-quality security and privacy as customers share lots of personal information and the existing chances of misusing this information.
• As there is always a constant change in the languages, emojis, accents, and dialects, it’s a big challenge for conversational AI to keep updating with the new patterns, short forms, and new normals used in human communication.
• Although conversational AI is equipped with a wide range of technologies, still it faces the challenge to make users from different regions and categories feel comfortable with modern technology. So, it has a big challenge before users to educate them about the opportunities it provides and the concepts which they are not aware of.

Future Insights of the Conversational AI Market

With the growing demand for AI-based virtual assistants and chatbots in customer service support, global conversational AI market is expected to witness striking growth in the near future. The market is expected to garner $13,291.3 million in revenue and rise exponentially at a CAGR of 21.4% over the analysis period from 2021-2028. Furthermore, the continuous technological advancements all across the world are expected to create expansive growth opportunities for the market in the upcoming days.

The Bottom Line

With the growing popularity of conversational AI for better customer services, many organizations are willing to opt for it for improving their customer support, marketing segment, and overall customer experience. Furthermore, the effortless and instance resolutions provided by conversational AI are the major factor for its enhanced utilization across industries in the coming future.

About the Author(s)

Princy A. J

Princy holds a bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from the prestigious Tamil Nadu Dr. M.G.R. University at Chennai, India. After a successful academic record, she pursued her passion for writing. A thorough professional and enthusiastic writer, she enjoys writing on various categories and advancements in the global industries. She plays an instrumental role in writing about current updates, news, blogs, and trends.