What is a Voice Bot?
Voice bots, also called voice-enabled chatbots, are AI-based software that take voice commands and reply by voice. They enable users to communicate faster compared to text-based bots. Like chatbots, voice bots are able to not just recognize what the user says but to understand the customer’s intent and have two-way communication to solve the users’ problems. In addition to the technologies used in text-based bots, voice bots also rely on transcription to first get user's commands in text form. They also rely on text-to-speech conversion to talk to users.
Steps involved in Voice Bots communication:
Similar to the working mechanism of chat bots, Voice bots needs to do the additional voice recognition step is required in voice bots compared to chatbots. As a first step, User/customer voice will be taken a mobile phone or computer with a microphone. Then it is directed to the cloud for decoding and the message content. The decoded message will be analyzed with all language applications techniques to categorize the requests and answering process will be taken care by the AI engines either it will prompt with an answer or action by creating a response. These responses would be converted to audio and sent to the user
Why is it important now?
Using voice bots provide a better, more natural user interface. Voice bots will drastically reduce the operational expenditure costs by eliminating Call Center set up costs. Either literate or particularly illiterate prefers to send /receive voice communication instead of typing a request. Most popular voice bot giants are:
Apple's Siri, Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant.
According to IBM, most of service-oriented businesses spend $1.3 trillion on 265 billion customer service calls each year. To reduce the expenditure, voice bots would be optimum solution and would be adopted all business model at the earliest.
Why voice bots come in priority than chatbots?
Many tech giants invested in voice technologies in recent years. A disadvantage of voice bot over textual chatbots is the speech recognition time. With the advances in both natural language understanding and speech recognition technologies, launching a voice bot is not significantly more challenging than launching a text based chatbot. Automation and immediacy are essentially needed to meet out business competencies. Particularly this pandemic situation creates a wide range of scope for Voice bots not only in banking/financial and Healthcare systems, even in SME sectors too.
Through best design Voice bots, the following features will be coming as a package in it:
- Real time processing
- Freedom to use colloquial language
- Pause, resume and repeat options are to be enabled in Listening
- Reconnection call facility during call drops
- Responding with exact solution/service by analyzing the customer’s according to their inputs
Important qualities to be considered for selecting the best Voice bot Provider
- Natural Language Understanding (NLU) Skills should be good and offered at cheapest prices
- Integration and installation should be simple and user friendly
- Purpose and Use cases should be analyzed in prior to select the application specific Voice Bots. It is necessary to determine exactly what purpose voice bot to use.
- In Pricing point of view, it is wise to go for Performance oriented payment plans