For a Successful Partnership in Choosing a Voicebot Solution, Companies Should Focus on These Most Common Challenges

The pandemic has also accelerated the pace of digital transformation and created an unprecedented wave of new users coming online from smaller towns and tier two and three cities. These new users make up a large population of the country, who are non-English speakers and rely on voice rather than text to communicate.

This has posed a formidable challenge for enterprises, as these users prefer to communicate in their regional languages and dialects. While many companies have decided to use chatbots for customer handling, chatbots come as a deterrent in that they may not deliver the human-like experience that customers have started to expect, and sometimes make demands. To handle rising call volumes, it makes sense for enterprise companies to employ multilingual voicebots and provide the best customer support. 

The Voicebot not only answers queries but can also perform complex tasks such as making recommendations, taking customers through a process, setting up new accounts, etc. Communicating with customers in their regional languages, when things remain unresolved or too complex, are unhindered to human agents. Apart from general, Voicebots can also help companies to analyze customers based on their speech patterns and get useful business insights like customer age, gender, region, dialect, tonality for better targeting.

Amit Gandhi, Founder of NovelVox

Although other companies have different business objectives, they will still need to custom-build the Voicebot to meet the needs of their individual customers. This will allow them to get vital information about their customers in order to serve them better. Therefore, it is important to recognize that deploying Voicebots is not a one-size-fits-all solution, but an ongoing optimization and optimization process that will be the key to a successful deployment, which can have maximum impact long-term, regardless of ROI. I can be immediate.

For a successful partnership in deploying Voicebots, enterprises should focus on these most common challenges:

Cultural Change: Naturally, any enterprise will need time to adapt to a new process and it takes three to six months to adapt to it. It's even more so for the end customer. An enterprise customer will not be familiar with the new way of interacting and may be surprised by suddenly switching to Voicebot, and it may take some time to get comfortable like any new experience. This is especially the case when Voicebot suddenly hooks up with a customer, without having tried and tested it on a small group.

Although it is important to see how quickly you can develop a Contact Center Voicebot, speed of development should not be the only objective. Ideally, Voicebots should be implemented in a phased manner, starting with a smaller audience. This will provide an opportunity to monitor and evaluate each stage against predetermined success criteria and enable rapid improvement before the application is expanded. 

In addition, companies must map out specific use cases, products, and scenarios where they can see Voicebots delivering value quickly and immediately. Lastly, enterprises should see how the customer is responding to it. Most of the time the signals given by the voicebot do not elicit the desired response from the customer. The best way to get the right information from the customer is to monitor, tune and adjust signals, see results and measure success before deciding on the next step.

Turnaround times: No new process introduced in a legacy system will be flawless. This can only be accomplished over time. While technology has a way of adapting rapidly, the only way to optimize a process is by working on customer feedback and fine-tuning the flow. 

In fact, according to a recent study, 82% of customers said they would change products or service providers after a poor experience with a company's customer service department. Hence, the quick turnaround time will make the customer happy as well as help Voicebot to adapt its solutions to suit the needs of the customer. One way to do this is by introducing an assisted plug-and-play or DIY system into the Voicebot system that allows customers not only to replace or flag any issues but also to teach them the craft with relevant suggestions, improvements. Shifts to a more mature self-service model.

Comprehension error: As enterprises adopt Voicebot to handle customer queries, reducing the error rate for speech recognition will be critical to building user trust. There are two types of errors: domain error, which is a knowledge gap in Voicebot understanding domain-specific terms, and user-understanding error, which is an error when Voicebot is not able to understand the input given by the user. This can be due to excessive background noise or too many inputs being given at the same time. 

A domain error can occur due to Voicebot not being updated with an understanding of the business domain. In the first three to six months, the system may encounter many or all of these errors. Fixing multiple issues at once can be difficult and overwhelming for teams on both sides. Therefore, it is best to analyze problems, allow the business to prioritize solutions, and ultimately fine-tune and tune systems to meet customer needs.

This content is written by: Amit Gandhi, Founder of NovelVox

Samsung unveils AI-powered Digital Avatar NEON that "Converse & Sympathise" like Real Humans

A Samsung lab on Tuesday unveiled a digital avatar it described as an AI-powered "artificial human," claiming it is able to "converse and sympathise" like real people.

The announcement at the opening of the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas touted a new kind of artificial intelligence called NEON, produced by the independent Samsung unit Star Labs.

But some industry experts questioned the lack of detail provided by Samsung on the underlying technology.

"As far as we can tell, there's no mystery here at all. NEON is just digital avatars - computer-animated human likenesses about as deserving of the 'artificial human' moniker as Siri," said the specialised tech website, The Verge.

"Don't worry about any 'AI android uprising' - these aren't the artificial humans you're looking for," it added.

According to the California-based unit of the South Korean giant, the technology allows for the creation of customised digital beings that can appear on displays or video games and could be designed to be "TV anchors, spokespeople, or movie actors" or even "companions and friends."

"NEONs will be our friends, collaborators and companions, continually learning, evolving and forming memories from their interactions," said Pranav Mistry, chief executive of the lab.

The NEON creators said the new virtual humans are the product of advances in technologies including neural networks and computational reality.

According to Star Labs, NEON is inspired "by the rhythmic complexities of nature and extensively trained with how humans look, behave and interact." The avatars "create life-like reality that is beyond normal perception to distinguish, with latency of less than a few milliseconds."

While digital avatars have long been able to be programmed for specific tasks such as role players in games, NEON goes further by enabling interactions that can incorporate human emotion.

Although the artificial humans may borrow features from real people, "each NEON has his or her own unique personality and can show new expressions, movements, and dialogs," the company said.

The announcement comes amid a proliferation of AI-manipulated computer videos known as "deepfakes," and growing concerns about how they could be used to deceive or manipulate.

Some analysts fear these fakes could be misused during an election campaign to exacerbate political tensions. Jack Gold, analyst at J. Gold Associates, said Samsung may be ahead of the pack if it can develop avatars that can show emotions and expressions."We have to wait and see what this means," Gold said.

"But it has major implications for many fields like customer service, help desk functions, entertainment, and of course could also be used to 'fake' a human interacting with a live person for bad or illegal purposes." Avi Greengart of the consultancy Techsponential said the avatars could be realistic but also "creepy."

"Leaving aside how impressive the technology is, will NEON be used in ways that people like, just tolerate, or actively hate?" he said.

According to Samsung and Star Labs, NEON offers avatars with lifelike reality "that is beyond normal perception to distinguish." The company envisions commercial opportunities to create avatars to be service representatives, financial advisors, healthcare providers or concierges.

"We have always dreamed of such virtual beings in science fictions and movies," Mistry said.

"NEONs will integrate with our world and serve as new links to a better future, a world where 'humans are humans' and 'machines are humane.'" The laboratory was launched in 2019 by Mistry, who had previously been a senior Samsung vice president and head of innovation at Samsung Mobile.

He was known for developing Sixth Sense, a gesture-based wearable technology system built at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The India-born Mistry also worked on projects with Microsoft and Google and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. (AFP)

ITC Infotech to Equip its Employees with Digital BOT, Ties with Automation Anywhere

ITC Infotech, a leading global technology services and solutions provider and a fully-owned subsidiary of ITC Ltd., is introducing a unique digital workforce solution by equipping every employee with a digital BOT, in partnership with Automation Anywhere®, one of the world's leading RPA platform providers backed by investors including Softbank.

Commenting on the initiative, Mr. Sudip Singh, MD & CEO, ITC Infotech said, "As a leading technology services company, we are truly embracing automation across our organization to 'Amplify Human Potential'. We are an organization committed to driving the adoption of automation and see immense potential in the digital amplification of our workforce. This initiative will also deliver higher efficiencies across client engagements. We are excited to partner with Automation Anywhere, and lead the way in creating a truly digital workforce of the future."

ITC Infotech intends to leverage Automation Anywhere's Digital Workforce Platform to empower its global workforce. By offering personal digital BOTs, it will enable employees automate and execute repetitive tasks and functions. As a part of the overall solution, ITC Infotech and Automation Anywhere will develop customized bots across various job roles, functions and departments at ITC Infotech.

"At Automation Anywhere, our vision is to create a world where every employee will work side by side with a software bot or digital workers, making the employees exponentially more productive and far more fulfilled. ITC Infotech's pioneering plans are closely aligned with our promise of creating an Intelligent Digital Workforce," said Mr. Milan Sheth, EVP IMEA, Automation Anywhere.

This holistic embrace of Automation sets the foundation for ITC Infotech to be the first Technology Services organization to have developed Digital Personas for different roles across the organization. In the Digitally enhanced work environment, digital assistants will aid in augmenting the capabilities of human workforce by building in predictability and higher productivity levels. And equally importantly, these digital assistants will directly impact employee experience by improving the quality of life at the workplace.

The digital BOTs will also deliver efficiency gains for ITC Infotech's clients, through enhanced productivity of the ITC Infotech workforce.

Facebook is Building on its Own Digital Assistant to Rival Siri and Alexa

A CNBC report in mid of this week suggested that Facebook has been working on building it own digital artificial intelligence (AI) assistant like Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant.

Led by Facebook's augmented reality and virtual reality group, a division that works on hardware, including the company’s virtual reality Oculus headsets, the flagship AI assistant by the social network giant is said be in making since early 2018.

Facebook has also officially confirmed the report from saying it’s working on an AI-based digital voice assistant in the vein of Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant.

In a statement to The Verge, a Facebook spokesperson said, "We are working to develop voice and AI assistant technologies that may work across our family of AR/VR products including Portal, Oculus and future products."

A Facebook team based out of Redmond, Washington is building the "Facebook Assistant" under the direction of Ira Snyder, a general manager at Facebook Reality Labs and a director of augmented and virtual reality at the company, sad the CNBC report.

Last year in October, Facebook launched its smart speakers called 'Portal' and 'Portal+' and currently these smart speakers relies on Alexa for assistant functionality, though one can control speaker functions like volume by saying "hey Portal". However, it remains a fact that Facebook doesn't have an AI assistant of its own.

[caption id="attachment_129825" align="aligncenter" width="750"] Facebook's Portal (left) and Protal+ (right) speakers.[/caption]

In 2015, Facebook unveiled its digital assistant called 'M', a Messenger app which was supposed to be the company's answer to Apple's Siri and Google's Assistant. The M however eventually got shut down by Facebook last year because unlike Siri and Alexa, which are led by AI, the project depended heavily on the help of humans to answer Facebook user's questions in the Messenger app.

This year in February, Facebook acquired GrokStyle, a San Francisco-based retail technology startup that uses AI to help users shop for furniture. Grokstyle has developed an app that automatically identifies furniture and home decor from just about any picture or angle.

Earlier this year, Facebook had also announced it was launching a blockchain group and the team of which is led by former PayPal and Facebook Messenger boss David Marcus.

India Soon to have AI-enabled Digital Assistant for Drivers Made by German Startup

Indian car drivers will soon be sitting with Artificial Inteligence- (AI-) enabled digital co-drivers without occupying any seat in their vehicle as Germany-based startup German Autolabs is bringing world's first digital assistant for drivers in India next year, that is - in just four months of wait.

Developed by Berlin-based startup German Autolabs, “Chris” is a voice-controlled digital assistant that allows drivers to make phone calls, send messages, listen to music and get navigation guides without ever touching their smartphones.

Chris is attached to the windscreen like a navigation device and paired with the mobile phone via Bluetooth so every vehicle turns into a connected car with high-end features. The full proactive digital assistant understands simple gestures and displays the relevant information on a colour screen.





With Chris, drivers can safely operate their mobile apps while driving by voice and gesture - messaging, navigation, calls and music, so that their eyes stay on the road only -- A Real Problem Solver for India, Isn't It ?

Yes it is ! Don't believe us ? then for unawares, a report by transport ministry of India said that the use of mobile phones while driving claimed 2,138 lives across India, in 2017 alone.

Coming back to Chris, it fits into any car, is easy to install, and works even if there is no internet connection. Moreover, it listens and talks to the driver with great accuracy, even in the noisy in-car environment.



Chris also helps with navigation with turn-by-turn navigation for maps from +100 countries.

For Chris to be operational, it requires a bluetooth enabled smartphone, Android 4.4 or higher/iOS 10 or higher, a 12V plug socket (cigarette lighter) or USB port to charge the built-in rechargeable battery. Some of Chris' features require a data connection on your smartphone.

Price of a Chris device is €252,09 i.e. about Rs. 21,000, according to the website.

In a press release statement, Daniel Mieves of German Autolabs, said, "We will be able to bring Chris to India next year. Mapping works in India, everything else works in India... but we do not yet have a distributor, need one. We have a lot of requests from India."

[caption id="attachment_125941" align="aligncenter" width="700"] German Autolabs Founders (L-R) - Holger G. Weiss and Patrick Weissert[/caption]

Founded in 2016, by Holger G. Weiss (former CEO at Aupeo) and Patrick Weissert (former Director Consumer at HERE), German Autolabs is a Berlin-based technology startup developing IoT (internet-of-things) solutions including Chris, the world´s first digital co-driver.

Via - Economic Times, German Autolabs

[Images Via - germanautolabs.com]