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.