Key Differences Between Chatbots and Voice Assistants

Chatbots are everywhere and are very popular in the market.

Unfortunately, they're not very popular with consumers, because they don't often deliver good experiences. The chatbot is usually a delimited system based on rules with well-defined categories. They know how to answer problem A, B and C — and nothing else.

Humans introduce a great deal of variation in the way they interact. That is, they don't follow the exact same process over and over again in the same way.

Conversational AI, by comparison, focuses on dialogue systems that allow it to manage human variation.

Unlike a chatbot, when AI seeks to understand the person's intention, different logical processes take place. You can have a multi-shift dialogue, ask follow-up questions, recognize the intention of your interlocutor and then compensate, in case that user has an unexpected answer.

The focus of conversational AI, in very clear terms, is the ability to manage human variation—especially in dialogue.

If you can understand human variation and have a multi-turn interactive dialogue with a person, rather than a single answer, it's possible to provide a much better experience than the traditional chatbot.

There's not much difference between interacting with a chatbot and choosing the manual option from 1 to 9 in an IVR, really. Since it doesn't have the flexibility of a human conversation, it's considered a limited technology.

Voice assistants in everyday life: a world of possibilities

The technology that brings our voice assistants to life has quickly become part of our everyday lives.

Today, the most popular voice assistants such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, and Google Assistant meet our simplest needs: creating our to-do lists, playing music, or telling us if it's going to rain.

However, voice assistance doesn't just serve individuals.

It can also be an excellent economic tool that companies can implement for improve productivity in the workplace, in addition to the mental health of your employees and customers alike.

The introduction of voice technology in business operations brings many benefits, including lower costs, greater efficiency and a competitive advantage in the market.

Another business benefit of voice assistants is that can reduce the time it takes to solve problems, giving their teams more time to work on complex tasks and providing customers with faster and more effective solutions.

For example, in the customer service area of companies, an intelligent voice assistant can answer inquiries, process payments and follow up on requests.

Unlike (human) customer service agents, intelligent voice assistants are available at all times to respond to queries and can generate a higher volume of calls in a fraction of the time, which reduces costs and increases revenues of the company.

With all this in mind, it is more evident how artificial intelligence is becoming more important every day in the lives of all of us, and Why do companies want to adopt this technology to be part of your daily operation.