What is a chatbot?

Have you ever encountered a pop-up along the sidebar of the website you are browsing, asking if you need help? That would be a chatbot. Driven by emerging technology in Artificial Intelligence, chatbots use Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand and answer a range of questions that are commonly asked. Given that chatbots can answer queries at any time— even in the dead of the night – they have become a popular form of technology adopted by many businesses looking to make the most of their website traffic.

However, chatbots are generally limited in their capabilities. While they are fed with a answer script that mirrors the way call centre service agents respond, chatbots usually only provide very general answers to a selected range of queries which may or may not be satisfying to the customers. More often than not, complex questions and requests would still require escalation to a customer service agent before they can be resolved.

Examples of common FAQ questions handled by a chatbot may include the operating hours of the company, or directions to their office. While the chatbot is able to fulfill some fundamental needs of a business through its on-demand service or prompt clarification of basic queries, the answers are mostly structured with little variance to the questions asked.

What then is a Talkbot?

A Talkbot, on the other hand, is more than a simple bot service. Involving more customisation to build, Talkbots are highly sophisticated customer service tools which are able to understand the user’s natural spoken language. A combination of technologies which include Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Machine Learning (ML) allows the Talkbot to understand questions in context and even detect and handle multi-intentions in a single sentence.

With its more nuanced understanding of the user’s queries, the conversation becomes more life-like, allowing a multitude of questions that can be posed and answered. Beyond simply fulfilling a passive role in the dialogue, the Talkbot is capable of initiating conversations and thereby prompt deeper engagement in any assigned topics—A key to building customer loyalty for your business.

A more superior solution to chatbots, Talkbots are able to proactively call on customers and engage in a realistic conversation. In other words, it is no different from a customer service agent. This is the magic of conversational A.I., which has the potential to supercharge your customer service standards.

What should I use? Chatbot or Talkbot?

It depends largely on the needs of your company. As mentioned earlier, chatbots are easily deployed and capable of answering simple queries like the email address of your office or even a list of services you provide in a short and concise manner, at any given time of the day. To a certain extent, they can also provide valuable insights by tracking what the common questions from your customers are. However, chatbots take a more passive role in the dialogue, are capable only of answering questions asked in a direct manner, and are often not able to understand and operate on contexts. When dealing with a chatbot, the customer would also have to be the more proactive party who initiates the conversation.

In contrast, Talkbots utilising conversational A.I technologies are able to proactively engage with customers in multi-round dialogues and can even handle vague responses in various contexts. Its capabilities can be deployed in a wide range of applications, across both inbound and outbound scenarios, such as FAQ hotline, appointment reminder calls, debt collection, customer surveys, cold calls, making them viable solutions for companies facing labor shortages during peak business periods or labor attrition problems. 

As opposed to using a human agent, Talkbots provide specific and useful customer insights to businesses as they are capable of tracking the call conversation and sieving out critical intentions. The Automatic Speech Recognition function in Talkbots allows all calls to be automatically logged, transcribed, labeled, and filed away for future action.

With Talkbots being more data-driven as compared to chatbots, audience segmentation can commence with ease, allowing for more targeted and strategic marketing efforts. In the long run, the Talkbot system can be continually improved with machine learning and can be tweaked to meet your customer’s ever changing needs.

It is not surprising that customers who surf the net often are able to easily identify who they are speaking to, whether it is a bot or a human agent. Customers may still feel distant from the companies they approach, even when there is a chatbot, because they know that this process of answering their queries are often automated. However, 95% of users are unable to distinguish between a Talkbot and a human agent. Talkbots listens, understands and speaks several different ASEAN languages with localised accents, it even incorporates human-like actions such as pauses, clarification statements and chasing statements. Furthermore, the text to speech (TTS) function of the Talkbot allows for the A.I’s voice to be programmed to read out certain client details. So instead of a cookie-cutter, generalised answer, Talkbots are able to embed the client’s information into their responses and this would facilitate a more personalized and realistic experience. For instance, Wiz. A.I’s bots are able to embed your date of purchase of an item into parts of the conversation in order to better relay information that might be useful for you.

The key defining feature that differentiates the Talkbot from the chatbot is the Talkbot’s ability to build a stronger relationship between the customer and your business. Picture this: When someone gets a call from a clinic to remind them of an appointment or if patrons of a website hosting service are called to be reminded of a free service that can boost their website traffic, the business will often come off as sincere and conscientious and this is enough to build a strong brand loyalty. With the Talkbot’s ability to proactively engage the clients and provide them with a customer service experience that highly resembles that of a human agent, Talkbots can automate repetitive processes and contribute to the optimization of your workforce.

Both the chatbot and the Talkbot are all part of our efforts to automate and optimise work efficiency. Before choosing which is better for your business, it is the best to think about your immediate and long term goals and how these two intelligent machines can meet your business needs.

Voice Artificial Intelligence that listens, understands and even sounds like us

What exactly is a Talkbot and more importantly how can it improve your business? But before we talk (pun intended) about Talkbots, we need to first understand that it is not just a quantum leap in futuristic technology but the culmination of decades of research and development into Artificial Intelligence (AI).

In 1950, Alan Turing—the father of computer science—first proposed a test which became known as the Turing test. Turing proposed that a computer is said to possess artificial intelligence if it can exhibit human-like behaviour, indistinguishable from that of a human. The goal of the test was to showcase a computer’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour and if human evaluators were able to be “fooled” into thinking they were chatting with a human when it was in fact a computer programme, that programme would have been deemed to have passed the Turing test.

In 2013, that test was finally passed by a programme called Eugene Goostman, during a demonstration at University of Reading. However, that test was done using text and today, these computer programmes became known as chatbots or virtual assistants.

The next natural step for artificial intelligence development was to create a virtual assistant which could interact with a human through natural spoken language. This has led to popular applications of conversational A.I. like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa which assist millions of lives every day. Despite such progress, these consumer applications still remain one dimensional and have limited robotic functionalities due to the lack of development in certain specialised verticals—e.g. you can ask Siri where the best pizza restaurant is but she cannot order or customize the pizza on your behalf nor can she sell your firm’s unique product offering to masses of prospective customers.

Enter the Talkbot

This is where Talkbots come in. Talkbots are highly specialised conversational voice AI assistants that can do the work on your organisation’s behalf and automate the many complex tasks needed to be achieved over a phone conversation.

A good Talkbot is not only one that speaks like a human but also understands like one. At Wiz.AI, we have a team of highly specialised data scientists who have spent years refining our solution for our customers.               

Wiz.Ai’s conversational AI Talkbots provide a hyper-realistic voice AI experience that engages customers through phone calls—so realistic that 95% of users do not recognise that they were talking to a voice AI in a real-life scenario.

Even though the human language is dotted with nuances, ambiguities and is often reliant on context and cultural cues, Wiz.AI’s natural language processing engine coupled with its customisable automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology enables the intents to be recognised, thereby facilitating conversations that are virtually indistinguishable from human-to-human ones.                         

What contributes to its hyper-realism is the Talkbot’s ability to identify and handle interruptions during calls and to listen continuously. When the caller has expressed confusion by keeping silent or is asking for a repeat of the statement, the Talkbot is able to pose clarification statements or chasing statements, thus maintaining the conversational nature of the Talkbot

We progressively improve our system’s ASR accuracy and natural language understanding (NLU) through regular NLU model training and the expanding of our speech corpus based on context-specific speech data. We continue to build and refine each successful AI model to give the most seamless call experiences to customers.

How can Wiz.AI optimize my business operations?

The Talkbots we build are part of an emerging technology that ensures rule-based tasks or repetitive jobs, such as calling clients to remind them about their debt payment and appointment dates, can be fully automated. This way, valuable labour can be channelled to other aspects where the expertise of the call centre agents can be fully utilised. Additionally, time-crunched customers are able to get direct responses to their problems, efficiently and effectively. As opposed to a reactive customer engagement, the Talkbots enable clients to shift their call conversations to ones that are more proactive.

When call centres experience unforeseen times of high-volume surge in calls, there may be a shortage of labour to respond to every call. Conversational AI Talkbots are able to handle the increased call volume in unexpected situations like these. Furthermore, in the context of Covid-19, Talkbots could also be a solution to labour attrition.

To add, labour efficiency comes in being able to consolidate all the best practices of your call centre agents into one entity—the Talkbot. There would not be any steep learning curve or time spent training an entire team, not to mention the follow-up action of having to monitor the calls to ensure that the directions have been adhered to. Instead, the Talkbot ensures that the service standard in the call centre is kept consistently high and is continuously improved over time with our machine learning models. Additionally, scaling up the call centre to cater to a multilingual audience is no longer a Herculean task for the HR department all thanks to the high customisability of a Talkbot. Wiz.AI currently supports English, Mandarin and Bahasa Indonesia—even creoles such as Singlish. This allows businesses to better manage their customer base in the forms of local languages.

Given that everything is becoming increasingly outsourced, especially call centre agents, Talkbots also allow for companies to once again take control of their branding and marketing. It is now easier than ever to ensure that your Talkbot embodies your company persona and more crucially, concretize changes and keep the service standards consistently high.

While our inboxes continue to be flooded with promotional emails, voice communication nevertheless remains a medium that is heavily relied on to express our thoughts and to catalyse actions. Conversational A.I Talkbots are equipped with the ability to deliver timely messages and facilitate direct interaction with your customers, and this in turn builds customer loyalty and hence higher returns on marketing investments.

Data-driven innovation

To ensure higher returns on investment, businesses would definitely need to know how and what to improve on. Talkbots provide empirical insights into what the calls were like so that changes can be intentional and targeted. For instance, our Talkbot allows you to identify the common points where the call drops off which then prompts you to improve on the scripting to ensure higher levels of customer engagement. In other words, data driven upgrades can be made to ensure that your Talkbots meet your business goals over time.

Now that personalised or targeted marketing is all the rage and have proven to effectively drive sales, conversational AI Talkbots can be used in a similar approach. Once we have established a customer persona, talkbots can be engineered to tackle your customer’s needs and in return, the information obtained from the call log can also be used to further improve the AI system in terms of making the script more strategic in order to ensure that not only high service standards are achieved but also conversion rates are raised.

I already have a call centre system up and running, can I merge it with a Talkbot?

We can integrate our Talkbots with your pre-existing call centre systems as well as relationship management software such as WhatsApp or emails to maintain healthy customer relations.

Wrapping up

The cutting-edge technology that is a Talkbot is the key to optimizing work at call centres and lowering costs. This emerging technology is bound to revolutionize customer management and take your business to the next level.