Sebastien Reeve, director of product management at Nuance Communications, explores why tech firms need to tailor their AI technology to the needs of consumers to succeed.
From Facebook launching chatbots on messenger, to Alexa and Google Home bringing virtual assistants to consumers on a greater scale than ever before, this year will certainly be remembered as ‘the rise of the bots.’
However, as this technology continues to transform our experience of engaging with companies and in the home, we’ll see the wheat separated from the chaff.
2017 will mark ‘the battle of the bots’, where some bots will succeed while others fail. During this time, we’ll see the good bots establishing industry best practices.
To date, it hasn’t all been plain sailing for the early innovators in the field. While a number of virtual assistants showed their true potential for positively revolutionising the customer experience, the chatbot that Microsoft launched on Twitter demonstrated how in the wrong hands this technology can have negative output, with the bot assimilating Twitter users’ worst tendencies into its personality.
Vendors, brands and industry analysts and experts all believe that bots are here to stay. Gartner has forecast that by 2020, the average person will have more conversations with bots than with their spouse. For brands, the rules of engagement will change, with 20% of brands expected to abandon their mobile apps by 2019.
So, what are the critical success factors of building a good bot? It is all about the customer experience. Forrester Research echoes this sentiment, stating that: “Today’s customers reward or punish companies based on a single experience — a single moment in time. This behaviour was once a millennial trademark, but it’s now in play for older generations. It has become normal.”
So what makes a successful bot?
Conversational artificial intelligence
To be successful, a bot must be capable of holding an intelligent, two-way conversation with a consumer. Like a human, the bot must be able to maintain context as the consumer changes subjects or uses colloquial, conversational expressions and words. Today, most bots are not sophisticated enough to do this. Some might be able to successfully respond to one, basic inquiry, such as “what is the temperature in Miami?”, but if the consumer follows up with “how about Beijing?”, most bots today cannot maintain context that the question is about the weather.
Cognitive artificial intelligence
This is the reasoning side of the bot’s brain and its ability to take action and even predict a customer’s needs. Whereas traditional speech recognition systems understand what people say, today’s sophisticated natural language systems understand what people mean and want to do.
Human assisted artificial intelligence
This is what Nuance calls supervised AI. By using human customer service agents as partners with bots, machine learning is accelerated and, importantly, bots learn the ‘right’ things from humans rather than on their own. This avoids the possibility of bots making critical judgment errors and making news headlines like we saw in 2016.
Omnichannel integration
Successful bots will not be standalone applications, but rather a set of common tools that operate like a central cognitive brain and which can be deployed across all of the channels consumers use – messaging applications, mobile applications, phone systems, the web and social media. An integrated omnichannel strategy will ensure customers have a consistent experience regardless of the channel they use. It also reduces the cost of siloed technology stacks for brands.
Intelligent authentication and security
Voice biometrics allows consumers to easily and naturally authenticate their identity without having to type in a password or PIN and by simply speaking a short passphrase. This eliminates the need for hard-to-remember PINs or worse, the need to answer a series of security questions. Furthermore, voice biometrics significantly improves security over legacy authentication methods and fraud.
With Gartner’s projections estimating as many as 20 billion connected devices by 2020, our lives are only going to become more connected. And infiltration of the Internet of Things in every part of our lives will lead us to continue to look to smarter solutions to use and manage these devices.
And whether it’s being used for customer service, in the home or in the car, bots are going to revolutionise the way we experience both products and services. Those companies that tailor their technology to the customer experience, with these critical success factors, will find themselves victorious in the battle of the bot.