Chatbots and Intelligent Bots

Intelligent Bots – AI Chatbots Transforming Business Operations

More and more businesses today are leveraging AI chatbots to optimise their operations and stay ahead of the competition. What began as a simple chat tool has evolved, thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence. Chatbots are now seamlessly integrated into daily business functions, particularly in customer service and support.

AI-powered bots have become one of the most prominent examples of artificial intelligence, as organisations seek to enhance user experiences and boost business value. Known as intelligent chatbots, these bots are equipped with AI and machine learning capabilities, enabling them to handle complex tasks and automate processes that would otherwise burden your workforce. To gain a competitive edge, intelligent bots are a powerful tool you can’t afford to ignore.

What are Intelligent Bots? 

Intelligent bots are based on the foundation of chatbots but utilise advanced technologies such as machine learning and natural language processing to undertake more complex queries. These AI chatbots can continuously learn and improve themselves with each subsequent human interaction, slowly adapting their conversations and emotions to the manner that people speak in. When deployed as part of an omnichannel strategy, intelligent bots can considerably boost an organisation’s competitive edge by improving productivity and lowering the cost of support. 

Features of an AI Chatbot

• Decoding human conversations: Understanding human interactions can be complex for technology due to the wide range of contexts and nuances involved. Intelligent bots, however, can analyse conversation sentiment and respond appropriately, closely mimicking human agents. They are designed to interpret queries even when there are typos or incomplete sentences by recognising intent and contextual clues.
• Human-like interaction: As the initial point of contact for many customers seeking support, intelligent bots must engage in conversations that feel natural, like interacting with a human. Customers appreciate feeling valued and understood, so chatbots should use conversational patterns that create comfort and provide a personalised experience.
• Knowing its limitations: An AI chatbot must be aware of its capabilities, efficiently handling tasks within its scope while escalating more complex inquiries to human agents when necessary.
• Anticipatory responses: Intelligent bots are programmed to stay ahead of the conversation, not only answering questions but also offering additional assistance proactively. By suggesting relevant options, they streamline interactions, condense multiple queries, and enhance the overall customer experience.
• Continuous learning: Through the power of artificial intelligence, these bots can improve over time by analysing chat transcripts and learning from every interaction. As they gather data, they become more adept at recognising customer issues, delivering more human-like responses, and resolving problems more efficiently.

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Role of AI Chatbots in Business 

Due to the smart nature of AI Chatbots, they have a diverse range of roles they can undertake in the business environment. These include serving as personal assistants, tech support, customer support, to even operating as an entire business function. Messenger chatbots have proliferated in the e-commerce industry, thanks to their 24/7 availability to provide support and engage with customers. However, AI chatbots’ practicality extends far beyond a customer facing use case.

Chatbots can serve as convenient assistants in industries such as finance, travel, healthcare, real estate, education and plenty more. Repetitive tasks are common in any industry and chatbots can help automate these transactional activities to free up staff’s time and energy so they can focus on more high value, stimulating work. Gartner estimates that by 2022, 70% of professionals will be interacting with a form of conversational AI daily. This means that it is essential that IT managers and decision makers are incorporating AI chatbots into their technology strategy to ensure continued business growth and competitiveness. If that isn’t reason enough to seriously consider chatbots for your organisation, then here are three more ways bots can help you realise your business goals.

Due to the smart nature of intelligent bots, they have a diverse range of roles they can undertake in the business environment. These include serving as personal assistants, tech support, customer support, to even operating as an entire business function. Messenger chatbots have proliferated in the e-commerce industry, thanks to their 24/7 availability to provide support and engage with customers. However, AI chatbots’ practicality extends far beyond a customer facing use case.

Which Channels can Chatbots be Deployed? 

Depending on the channels that your organisation uses to communicate with customers and internal staff members, you can better engage personnel with the help of a chatbot. Chatbots can be deployed on nearly any digital platform such as websites, social media, and mobile apps. Here are a few channels that an intelligent bot can be deployed and their own respective advantages. 

AI Chatbots for Websites

Deploying a chatbot to your website can be a helpful engagement tool that delivers a personalised experience for the visitor. An intelligent chatbot can converse with the individual in a friendly manner reminiscent of a human agent, providing them with prompt support should they have any questions that arise. They can help you convert your visitors into prospective leads by honing down on their needs and segmenting them by asking unique questions. With the vast majority of website visitors not taking any action when they land on a webpage, chatbots can act as a guide or reminder in directing users to download a guide or sign up to a newsletter. By capturing the visitor’s contact details, they can be added to a marketing automation whereby engagement material can be sent to them so they can move further down the marketing funnel.

AI Chatbots for Microsoft Teams

The communication and collaboration platform already has multiple pre-configured chatbots such as ScrumGenius and Polly which have made it exceptionally easy for team mates to keep track of tasks and stay connected with one another. Chatbots deployed within the fabric of Microsoft Teams are used internally by organisations to improve staff productivity, internal communications, and foster a positive work culture. However, organisations are also empowered to build a custom bot using Microsoft’s Power Virtual Agents offering where they can create powerful chatbots without needing lines of code. These can be deployed to a designated channel or team and perform actions such as send reminder notifications or emails using conditional logic.

Antares provides both Power Virtual Agents and custom bot development services that can assist with many common business functions. With Microsoft Teams being the tool of choice for internal communication, chatbots can greatly enhance how internal staff undertake their daily tasks which can lead to a boost in productivity and efficiency. Read more to discover how Antares deployed an educational chatbot in Teams for UNSW and provided students with 24/7 support whilst saving educators precious time that was previously spent on answering repetitive questions.

AI Chatbots for Facebook Messenger

Messenger bots have become a common customer engagement tool on Facebook that is used by businesses. As chatbots are still a relatively new marketing concept compared to paid advertising, by opting to use a conversational chatbot as part of your customer communication strategy can help organisations reach their target audience more directly. There are currently over 300,000 active chatbots available on Facebook Messenger which perform a variety of different tasks such as providing 24/7 customer support, handling e-commerce transactions, scheduling appointments, and sending reminders. Organisations can enjoy significant cost and labour savings thanks to chatbots’ abilities to instantly resolve customer queries and collect user data that can be used for better personalised targeting.

AI Chatbots for Mobile apps

Chatbots deployed on mobile apps allow organisations to interact with customers in a more intimate fashion of one-to-one messages. AI powered bots that provide customised replies based on customer responses can be leveraged to answer recurring queries, delivering an always on platform for customer support. Organisations can choose to either introduce a chatbot to an existing mobile app or develop a mobile app solely for the chatbot. New mobile apps are more suited to internal facing use cases such as streamlining employee onboarding or automating expense reports. Incorporating a chatbot to a current mobile app is best suited for external customer facing scenarios due to their existing user base. With the increasing occurrence of app fatigue, this option does not require customers to download a separate app to access the functionalities provided by the AI chatbot.

Natural Language Processing

Natural Language Processing is a branch of artificial intelligence that involves technology extracting, interpreting and deriving meaning from human language to make sense of it. NLP works by breaking down sentences into shorter pieces and then applying analytics to determine the relationships between the pieces before combining them together with the relevant context to create meaning. With NLP, chatbots are able to better identify the customer’s intent, sentiment, and emotions, enabling them to converse more naturally. This removes the robotic feeling that may come across when communicating with chatbots. Below are the elements of Natural Language Processing that are involved in chatbots:

• Utterance: These are the inputs made by the user which the chatbot will derive intent and entities from.
• Intent: An intent refers to the intention and the motive of the user when sending a message to a chatbot. They are often recognised by chatbots as a combination of a verb and a noun, for example, deleteContact.
• Entity: Entities are text that are usually nouns which can describe anything such as time, location, number, city, and organisation. They specify the intent of the user and are important to capture in determining what action for the chatbot to undertake.
• Context: Context is the set of predefined parameters in which a chatbot operates during a session. It is used to maintain the state of the conversation and helps stores any data exchanged between the user and the bot.
• Session: A session is a single conversation between a user and a chatbot. It usually begins when a user starts interacting with the bot and concludes when their need has been resolved and they stop conversing with the chatbot.

How do AI Chatbots work?

There are five core steps involved in chatbots being able to understand, interpret and converse with a user:

1. Tokenising: Tokenising involves a sentence being broken up into singular words called tokens whereby punctuation is also removed. This process turns a sentence into a format that a computer can comprehend.
2. Normalising: The chatbot then processes the text to identify typos, slang, abbreviations, and common spelling errors before converting them to a standard version of the word. During this procedure, another step called lemmatisation also occurs which transforms words with the same meaning into their root forms where they can then be analysed as a single item.
3. Recognising entities: Named Entity Recognition is where the chatbot identifies and categorises what type of information the text entails. These pieces of information are referred to as entities and can be a singular word or a phrase. For example, the bot would identify Tokyo as a location and Nathan as a name.
4. Dependency Parsing: With dependency parsing, the relationship between two words is analysed to reveal what the user wishes to convey. The chatbot separates the sentence into nouns, verbs, subjects, phrases, and punctuation where the grammatical structure is then examined to identify dependencies.
5. Generation: Finally, the chatbot generates several appropriate responses based on the information determined from the previous steps. As each of the responses have the same meaning, the bot selects and sends the response that best correlates with the context of the user’s question and their linguistic nuances.

Types of Intelligent Bots

• Pre-built: Pre-built bots are readily available and can be deployed quickly. They come with pre-configured features and are cost-effective, making them an ideal choice for organisations with limited budgets. However, expanding their functionality beyond the default scope can be challenging and may require additional effort.
• Custom-built: For businesses needing a bot tailored to specific functions or complex processes, a custom chatbot is a better option. Custom bots are designed with unique logic and features to meet your organisation’s exact needs, making them well-suited for industries with specialised requirements.

To choose the right type for your organisation, consider these questions:

• How advanced do you need the bot to be? Custom bots offer unlimited flexibility in terms of capabilities, designed specifically for your organisation’s unique needs and able to handle complex tasks. In contrast, pre-built solutions are limited to general use cases, which may not fit the needs of businesses in niche industries.
• What’s your budget for a chatbot? Building a custom chatbot is more expensive than opting for a pre-built one. If your budget is tight, you may have to sacrifice some functionality. However, while the initial investment for a custom bot is higher, it can be more cost-efficient over time since you won’t be paying for features you don’t need, and it will be tailored to your business operations.
• How fast do you need the chatbot? Pre-built bots come with templates that allow for a quick launch, enabling deployment in minutes. However, they may require adjustments over time to meet your exact needs. Custom bots, on the other hand, take longer to deploy, as they are built from the ground up. The process involves coding, testing, and multiple revisions to perfect the solution.

Future of AI Chatbots

There is no denying that chatbots are here to stay with more and more companies incorporating it into their customer service and internal processes. The rise of artificial intelligence and its application to multiple business enabled technologies means that more industries and business functions can benefit from its implementation.

The success of chatbots within the customer service landscape will grow exponentially thanks to its seamless integration with many CRM offerings which enables lead nurturing and targeted marketing to be conducted automatically. A key differentiator in how organisations undertake their customer support and engagement will be dependent on how they leverage the power of chatbots and how advanced AI has been integrated within the technology. Customers now have a multichannel digital presence with an increased expectation to have their needs served by organisations on the platforms of their choosing. Greater optimisation of AI chatbots means there will be more satisfactory customer experiences whereby bots can handle more complex tasks and play key roles in any organisation.

Increased development in the field of natural language processing and machine learning means that chatbots will take on human-like characteristics that allow for more natural, conversational flows. Chatbots will be able to see through typos and comprehend intricate human nuances that make it possible for them to undertake the role of virtual assistants. They will increasingly be able to resolve queries and problems without the need of human intervention, resulting in greater labour and cost savings for organisations.