Growing customer expectations and rising operating costs can be challenging for businesses of all sizes, and failing to provide high-quality customer service can have many negative consequences.
To address this challenge, many businesses are turning to conversational AI solutions to automate business processes and provide personalized customer experiences.
Conversational AI is designed to facilitate communication between computers and humans through understanding language and text. Conversational AI may support multiple languages and respond in a way that mimics human conversation. As 83% of companies consider using AI in their strategy to be a high priority, it definitely has many advantages.
However, building conversational AI that can effectively understand and respond to natural human conversation presents a major challenge, as many factors can impact the ability of these technologies to accurately interpret and respond to user input. These include differences in network and audio quality, variations in English proficiency and use of slang or regional dialects, and more.
"Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last unless we learn how to avoid the risks.” - Stephen Hawking
Although there are advances in "deep learning" that have enabled the development of more sophisticated conversational AI systems, businesses still face many challenges as they work to build and refine their conversational AI systems. Some of these include:
1. Safety and Security
It is important to ensure that data transmitted through voice assistants and chatbots is processed and stored securely, especially when it comes to sensitive or confidential information. It is essential that companies communicate their high-security standards for these channels to their customers to establish trust.
It is necessary to design conversational AI applications that ensure the protection of personal information. This is especially important when performing sensitive individual data analytics that may be at risk of being accessed or taken.
In short, security should be top of mind when deploying voice assistants and chatbots to protect personal information and maintain trust with customers.
2. Understanding Emotions
While voice assistants have improved their ability to understand the content of users' requests, there is still room for improvement in their ability to recognize and respond to the emotional cues of those requests.
To address this challenge, it is necessary to train digital conversational agents on a diverse set of human voices so that they can learn to identify and respond appropriately to different emotions. This will help them better understand the context in which a request is made and enable them to provide more personalized and meaningful responses.
By working on this aspect of their capabilities, voice assistants can become more effective at facilitating effective communication and building stronger relationships with their users.
3. Conversations in Native Languages
The fact that only a small percentage of the world's population speaks English as their first language presents a challenge for voice assistants seeking to expand their reach and build trust with users. It is important for voice assistants to be able to have conversations in a variety of languages, including those spoken as a first language by users. This will allow more people to access and benefit from these technologies.
In addition, it is necessary to take into account the diversity of dialects and cultural differences within different regions to ensure that voice assistants can communicate effectively and appropriately with users around the world.
4. Simultaneous Conversations
In situations where multiple people may be using a voice assistant or smart speaker in the same room, it is important for the device to be able to differentiate between different speakers accurately and understand which instructions or requests are intended for it.
As 63% of smart speaker owners place their devices in the living room and engage in conversations, it can be especially challenging if the voices are similar or if there is an overlap in the conversation. To prevent confusion and protect sensitive user data, voice assistants and smart speakers need to be able to distinguish between different voices and avoid duplicate recording information. If this is not properly handled, it can lead to data redundancy and the creation of "ghost" identities, which can pollute the data and compromise its accuracy and usefulness.
