When I was a kid, one day my father, who was then working with the postal department of India, explained about the planned usage of computers in his department. He was not able to comprehend the idea of a machine replacing his work (sorting emails based on the address and group them in different bags) and was worried about learning this new thing, downsizing, etc. Come 2017, in his 70s, he is on a smartphone now doing video calls with his grandchildren.
The trends are changing so fast and at times I used to think that no one can afford to miss the trends in technology – be it a common man or business houses. Some of the trends that have crossed us already in the near past are:
1. Mobile: SmartPhones have taken over and you cannot afford to think of an ecosystem without that
2. Social networking: The way in which people think/interact/relate are manipulated strongly by social media and networking and this is very true for millennials. Increasing people are looking for images/videos than textual presentations (don’t ask why I am writing this article. I am not good for videos 🙂
3. Fatigue: Too much information and data floating around with thousands of apps has created a state of fatigue for many
4. Outsourced thinking: With the above three trends, people find it difficult to assimilate too much of data and want someone to think and take decisions on behalf of them. People always look for recommendations and crowdsourced ideas for any decision making (be it dating to high-value investments)
5. Self-service: People want everything available 24 X 7 and want to solve any issues by themselves either by textual or social media-based interactions with business entities
The last two trends that have tuned our thought process are leading us to the world of Artificial Intelligence with voicebots or text-based BOTS.
What are Bots and AI?
In simple terms, bots are software programs that include AI components to interact with people over text or voice messaging. Backed by AI, bots today are being used for ordering food, listening to music, finding information about your favorite author, checking the weather, etc. The AI component of bots helps in recommendations and making decisions for you. Built on NLP and Machine Learning, bots are based on the human ability to learn and absorb information.
Why are the big trends?
1. AI thinks for us and delights us as they know more about us and makes life better both for service providers and service seekers.
2. Voicebots are backed with intelligence based on data and the interaction is very simple either via text or voice.
3. The ability of bots to be available 24 x 7 without any emotional quotient and to scale at peak times makes them an excellent support resource for an enterprise environment.
4. Amazon Echo, Google Home, Microsoft Cortana, and Apple Siri have become more of personal assistants than bots and with increased learning and progress in data science, they are bound to grow in various spaces.
5. The progress in fundamental science via NLA and ML is widening the application areas via AI. Natural language processing (NLP) helps in the linguistic application and machine learning assists with statistical power to perform clustering and classification.
Though I said earlier that I am writing this article as I am not good for videos, the real reason is that at OptiSol we have built a couple of Alexa skills that are accessed via Echo and we are excited with the impact it has created for our enterprise clients. We have also done few chatbots using python, deep learning for service booking and restaurants and it has got excellent patronage from consumers. Do you want to test the water and explore how voicebots and chatbots can help in your business? Talk to us for a free PoC! We are the leading conversational ai chatbot service providers in UK | US | India.
Author Bio:
Prem Kumar – Co-founder & Director of OptiSol – Providing digital services for startups and enterprises with a team of 150+ experts.
