Interactive AI – A Step Closer to Conversational Artificial Intelligence

The development of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered assistants has witnessed a massive revolution. What started off as a tech trend has slowly become an indispensable asset to a business enterprise, supporting sales, service and other business functions across multiple industries. We have virtual sales assistants taking in humanistic conversations to customers making sales and generating leads.  Powered by AI, these virtual sales assistants enable business enterprises to generate leads than ever before and provide a polite and persistent lead follow-up which often generates to increased sales figures. Virtual sales assistants are a win-win for both the business and the customers as these virtual assistants never get tired or sick or take a day off, leaving salespeople free to do more valuable activities, and customers love them because they are resourceful and provide assistance customised to a customer's requirements.

Today's era of interactive conversational AI was developed on the historical innovations in AI, which started with email and technologies like Usenet newsgroups. What started with simple search engines like Archie and directories like Yahoo, has translated into interactive assistants like Google, Alexa, Cortana and Siri. Interestingly the pace of innovation is not slowing, from here.

Business enterprises and the IT industry in tandem have developed an architecture that enables computers, acting as AI agents interact with customers in humanistic conversations. The technology behind is an AI natural language understanding engine, developed on computational linguistics, machine learning and deep learning. Human conversations through value feedbacks and open-ended answers are deployed as train unstructured data to the AI natural language understanding engine. This engine translates the conversational inputs into dynamic business conversations powered by AI that engage humans through chatbots interactions. Thus, the AI-powered Chatbots in a polite, resourceful and personal chat helps both the business and the customer achieve their desired goals.

NLP or natural language processing drives the "naturalness" of human conversations with AI assistants. The interactive AI is based on the pillars of four types of NLP, which allow reading, classification, understanding of responses, and the combination of rule-based approaches. Traditional machine learning and deep learning accessed from millions of business conversations come together into ensemble learning NLP. This offers a diverse set of resources to handle a wide variety of questions and provides effective responses. It is NLP that transforms raw big data from customer relationship management (CRM) systems as natural language inputs and to generate outputs in the form of responses.

The verdict is out, AI-powered conversational assistants, when set to sales, leads generate 20-30% more appointments than human teams working alone. Conversational AI provides a cost-effective solution to increase sales leads as it is programmed to understand the intent, sentiment and urgency. Conversational AI is empowered to sense the language of the customer's response and automatically translate their answers to the customer's language. They can extract important data, like telephone numbers, email addresses of the customers for future sales follow-ups.

For business enterprises across the global economy, conversational AI is the technology of the hour to increase productivity and improve customer satisfaction. Modern AI has come a long way from its rudimentary past, and the future looks far more exciting with Conversational AI redefining human interactions.