It was an awful day for Anshuman. At the workplace, he accidentally spilled water on his iPhone. Next, his car broke down in the middle of nowhere. On reaching home, he found a pizza delivered cold. He had ordered that on his way to set his mood right. Determined to vent out his anger, he visited the pizza delivery service website.
He rudely complained about the cold pizza over chat and was instantly greeted by a person. The person on the other end was polite. After chatting with him for a little while, Anshuman regained his composure. Wait a minute! Do you think the person at the other end was a customer service agent?
No, nowadays most businesses have talking robots for executing such tasks. It was a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence. It is artificial intelligence which is making these chatbots pervasive. These bots are now doing almost every task starting from taking food order, hotel room reservation, and scheduling of appointments to client reporting, employee training, and sales automation.
Chatbots now have a remarkable ability to interact with humans via messages or voice commands. So, do you know how these chatbots work or are bringing a new dimension to communication? Let’s explore!
How do chatbots work?
“A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.”
The famous quote by Alan Turing, the pioneer of AI and modern computing is gradually becoming a reality with advanced chatbots. These bots work by simulating human conversations with the help of natural language processing (NLP) while remaining connected to a vast database. Meanwhile, NLP is a branch of artificial intelligence (AI) that has contributed immensely in recent years in enabling machines to understand human language. Some of the steps that a chatbot undertake for understanding the human voice or text are as follows:
After completing these steps, messages or speech gets converted into structured data and chatbots ably choose the most suitable response from their database or information base.
Chatbots revolutionizing communication
Powered by AI, chatbots are now gradually but steadily revolutionizing the way we communicate. Entrepreneurs across the world are acknowledging its potential in keeping their customers engaged or satisfied.
Makes communication more instant
Nowadays, people prefer to communicate via instant messaging instead of text messaging (emails or SMS). We love Facebook Messenger, Skype, WhatsApp, and other such instant messaging apps that allow us to send messages instantly.
As chatbots can be made available 24×7 because of no fatigue which is associated with humans, chatbots have become the favorite customer support executive of millions of businesses across the world. According to a survey conducted by Ubisend, a UK-based company offering chatbot, AI, and machine learning solutions, 69% of customers out of 2,000 respondents said that they use these bots to get an instant answer.
Eliminates repetitiveness and frustration
Most of the times, customer representatives answer the same questions over phone or chat. This repetitiveness causes frustration among them, but with chatbots, businesses are effectively eliminating this repetitiveness and subsequent frustration.
No longer, customer representatives have to answer monotonous questions. They can instead be engaged in high-value tasks that are not repetitive. Many federal agencies have acknowledged the potential of chatbots in answering generic queries that are repetitive and have their own chatbots for rendering better public service.
In India, IRCTC is probably the only Government entity having a chatbot for offering a quick response to all queries related to IRCTC services. It is easy to spot disha, the chatbot powered by AI and machine learning in the right-bottom of the website.
No doubt, Christie Pitts, Chief of Staff of Backstage Capital was absolutely right when she said, “Chatbots represent a new trend in how people access information, make decisions, and communicate.” It will be interesting to find out how these chatbots coupled with artificial intelligence will get explored by Indian enterprises like in those in the overseas.
