What is Conversational AI?
Conversational AI is a field within artificial intelligence (AI) that enables machines to understand, process, and respond to human language in a natural and engaging manner. By mimicking human conversation, Conversational AI can assist customers through chatbots, voice assistants, and other interactive interfaces, providing a seamless and efficient user experience.
Proof of the pudding: According to Gartner, by 2025, customer service organisations that embed AI in their multichannel customer engagement platforms will elevate operational efficiency by 25%.
How does it work?
01
Data collection
Gathering relevant data from various sources.
02
Data preparation
Cleaning and organizing data to make it suitable for analysis
03
Model training
Using algorithms to train a model on the prepared data
04
Model evaluation
Gathering relevant data from various sources.
05
Model deployment
Gathering relevant data from various sources.
06
Monitoring and maintenance
Gathering relevant data from various sources.
How businesses are using
Conversational AI
From enhancing customer engagement to automating support tasks, Conversational AI is transforming various industries and allowing them to scale without adding cost or compromising on service promises.
Healthcare
Conversational AI can assist patients with scheduling appointments, providing medical information, and offering mental health support. It significantly improves patient engagement and accessibility to healthcare services.
Case Study: Nuance uses Conversational AI to offer 24/7 medical advice through a chatbot, helping their customers receive timely information and support.
Use cases:
- Patient triage and symptom checking.
- Appointment scheduling and reminders.
- Mental health support through chatbots.
- Providing medication information and adherence reminders.
Healthcare
Conversational AI can assist patients with scheduling appointments, providing medical information, and offering mental health support. It significantly improves patient engagement and accessibility to healthcare services.
Case Study: Nuance uses Conversational AI to offer 24/7 medical advice through a chatbot, helping their customers receive timely information and support.
Use cases:
- Patient triage and symptom checking.
- Appointment scheduling and reminders.
- Mental health support through chatbots.
- Providing medication information and adherence reminders.
Finance
Financial institutions use Conversational AI to provide customer support, assist with transactions, and offer personalised financial advice. This technology helps in improving customer experience and operational efficiency.
Case Study: Bank of America’s Erica is a virtual assistant that helps customers with their banking needs, from checking account balances to making transactions and providing financial tips.
Use cases:
- Customer service through virtual assistants.
- Automated handling of common banking transactions.
- Personalised financial advice and planning.
- Fraud detection and alerts through conversational interfaces.
Retail
Retailers leverage Conversational AI for customer support, personalised shopping experiences, and handling inquiries about products and services. This technology enhances customer engagement and drives sales.
Case Study: H&M uses a Conversational AI chatbot on their website and mobile app to assist customers with product searches, order tracking, and personalised fashion recommendations.
Use cases:
- Virtual shopping assistants for product recommendations.
- Handling customer inquiries and support requests.
- Order tracking and status updates.
- Personalised marketing and promotions.
Manufacturing
In manufacturing, Conversational AI assists with internal communication, troubleshooting equipment issues, and providing training resources. It ensures efficient operations and improved worker productivity.
Case Study: Siemens uses Conversational AI to provide real-time support to technicians on the factory floor, offering troubleshooting tips and maintenance advice.
Use cases:
- Real-time support for equipment troubleshooting.
- Automated internal helpdesk for employee queries.
- Providing training and safety information.
- Streamlining communication across teams.
The Core Capabilities of
Conversational AI
Natural Language Processing
Understanding and processing human language to provide meaningful responses. It is crucial for interpreting user inputs accurately.
Practical Use Cases:
01
Parsing customer queries to provide relevant answers.
02
Translating languages in real-time for global support.
03
Extracting key information from conversations for analysis.
04
Enabling multi-turn conversations for complex interactions.
Speech Recognition
Converting spoken language into text. It is essential for voice-activated systems and virtual assistants.
Practical Use Cases:
01
Transcribing customer calls for analysis.
02
Enabling voice commands in mobile applications.
03
Assisting with dictation and note-taking.
04
Enhancing accessibility for visually impaired users.
Text-to-Speech
Converting text into spoken language. It provides a voice to AI systems, making interactions more natural.
Practical Use Cases:
01
Reading out information to users in a conversational manner.
02
Providing verbal assistance in navigation systems.
03
Offering auditory alerts and notifications.
04
Enhancing customer service with voice responses.
Dialog Management
Managing the flow of conversation to ensure coherent and contextually relevant interactions.
Practical Use Cases:
01
Handling multi-turn conversations smoothly.
02
Maintaining context across different interactions.
03
Escalating to human agents when necessary.
04
Personalising conversations based on user history.
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Advanced Conversational AI Techniques
The table below dives deeper into advanced Conversational AI techniques. These techniques require significant computational resources and expertise for implementation.
Criteria
Transformer Models
Generative Models
Transfer Learning
Definition
Models that use attention mechanisms to understand context and improve language understanding.
Models that generate human-like text based on input data.
Utilising a pre-trained language model on a new, related problem.
Goal
Improve understanding and response accuracy by focusing on context.
Create coherent and contextually appropriate responses.
Leverage existing models to reduce training time and improve performance on new tasks
Algorithms
Attention layers, encoder-decoder architectures.
GPT-3, BERT.
Fine-tuning pre-trained models, domain adaptation.
Data Requirement
Requires large amounts of conversational data.
Requires substantial data to generate meaningful text.
Requires less data than training a model from scratch, using pre-trained models.
Advantages
High accuracy in understanding context, ability to manage long conversations.
Capable of generating high-quality, human-like text.
Significantly reduces training time and resources, improves performance with less data.
Applications
Customer support chatbots, virtual assistants, automated transcription services.
Content creation, automated report generation, conversational agents.
Custom chatbots, virtual assistants, sentiment analysis.
Techniques
Self-attention, transformer networks, BERT.
Generative pre-trained transformers (GPT-3), fine-tuning on specific tasks.
Model fine-tuning, transfer learning architectures like GPT, BERT.