A.I. will speak more naturally and assist people better
Phone call assistants
Phone call-based support is nothing new, but it represents the next step in the development of AI-driven customer experience solutions. Those who incorporate and improve upon existing speech solutions have the chance to dominate the market, but this technology also has its own obstacles.
Although WhatsApp claims that its network is used to distribute over 100 billion messages every day, a recent Vonage analysis indicates that consumers still prefer mobile phone calls over all other forms of contact with companies. Therefore, it’s more crucial than ever to be able to meet consumers where they are and give service the way they desire it as omnichannel solutions continue to increase the number of ways customers can engage with a business for a purchase or product issue. Even while social media apps are increasingly used for things other than posting images and making brief announcements, digital engagement is still expanding, and it is apparent that voice support is still necessary.
As explained by Forbes, beyond enhancing customer engagement, voice support has numerous advantages. Many businesses do not currently record client talks, which makes it difficult for them to analyze the information from phone-based consumer interactions. Without the machine learning that powers many of today’s speech bots, it would be a logistical nightmare and take hours of support agents’ time that they could be used to help other customers efficiently process the quantity of information being sent during these calls. In order to improve service flows and responses for, both live and virtual agents, organizations should instead use the data generated by speech bots, which will have a double-positive effect on the customer experience.
Every customer support staff uses time as a key performance indicator, and the objective is to reduce the time it takes for customers to get their requirements addressed, whether it be for a technical issue, to check on the progress of an order, or for any other reason. Wait times at some of the biggest international institutions during the height of Covid-19 skyrocketed as a result of personnel shortages and a spike in client queries.
Even though this is the most extreme case, it serves as an example of a problem that could arise at any time. There are countless circumstances in which a company may be unexpectedly confronted with a rise in client inquiries, whether it be due to an internal product update or an external event like Covid-19. Companies risk being left high and dry if they can’t immediately hire tens of new support agents. To prepare for situations like this, companies should think about onboarding technologies that can grow to meet consumer demands in a matter of seconds.
As with every technology, voice bots have their own set of difficulties that suppliers must overcome while creating their solutions. These difficulties can be dealt with in a variety of ways. Speech input is one of the biggest. Voice bots must take into account the little or significant variations in how each caller reacts to prompts, in contrast to text-based chatbots that analyze portions of text. Situations like dialects, speaking quickly and clearly, and background noise all have a significant impact on transcribing accuracy, which is crucial for comprehending the user.
In addition, bias is a crucial factor to take into account with any bot. Even though everyone can input the same line of text, the accuracy of a voice bot’s answer based on a person’s vocal mannerisms might cause a disparity in how a voice bot is used by a variety of users. Even bots supported by enormous data sets can be fooled, as demonstrated by a study that found Google’s voice assistant to be 13% more accurate for males than for women.
Although unintentional, bot bias has practical effects. The success of the bot could be at risk if it has trouble identifying responses from a user demographic that makes up the majority of your client base. Although it is not an insurmountable issue, it must be taken into consideration when keeping track of user comments on any bot’s performance.
Even if there are 5 billion phones in use worldwide, high-quality voice assistance will continue to be essential for a very long time. Even the biggest businesses will be able to offer the kind of personalized experience customers are looking for thanks to a quick response time and a conversational engagement point over the phone being driven by a virtual assistant, increasing brand loyalty over time.
For those who are thinking about using a speech bot in their CX (Customer Experience) flow, it would be better to start small and expand incrementally by keeping the number of questions the bot can answer (known as intents) limited at first. You can reduce the possibility that the bot will have to direct users to live support agents at launch and achieve rapid wins by starting with a bot that is focused on a few specific themes and working to optimize the answer flows before extending to a larger variety of subject areas.
However, it should not be forgotten that automated support cannot always be a 100% replacement for user issues. And it is important to remember that neglecting this aspect could be even worse than biases, since it is not new that users are, for example, suspended from services on which they usually work and have achieved certain goals without having the opportunity to replicate, since everything is managed so automatically that it has become undemocratic.
Chatbot with voice
However, with the arrival of ChatGPT, the way people chat with bots is radically changing. Conversations look more natural and can satisfy a variety of requests. It’s like a big brain trained with so much data to look omniscient. Therefore, this solution will surely be the evolution of personal assistants in many fields. That’s why when AI will be good at speaking as it is at conversing (but we’re close), we’ll have an engaging assistant able to help us in many aspects of our life, such as organization, psychological support and in improving our knowledge without needing to ask different experts.
Anyway, we can’t forget to mention the risk of relying too much on such technology. We know that the answers provided are not always right and the risk is that too many people believe in a wrong explanation because it’s too convenient. Therefore, we shouldn’t replace experts but this could be a way to clarify initial doubts about a topic.
In addition, if we all get information exclusively from an A.I. like ChatGPT, we wouldn’t develop new knowledge but we would always employ the same data without adding new. That’s why it’s important that this tool doesn’t become the only one used to generate information.
AI Voice Generators
Still talking about voice, we can also consider voice AI voice generators which are replacing the old TTS (Text To Speech) applications. With the ability of AI to generate increasingly natural voices with features like the emphasis on words and different tones of voice, we will be able to have a voice for a variety of uses such as movies, podcasts, audiobooks, etc… Not to mention the special option that some of these tools offer, namely the cloning feature that allows cloning our or someone else voice to make the speech with that specific voice. It sounds scary, and it is if you think this could be used for illicit purposes. However, it could be very helpful to give back a voice or a natural voice for those who can’t speak anymore as happened with the actor Val Kilmer for the movie Top Gun – Maverick due to his throat cancer.
