Implementing smart assistants creates a streamlined flow of regular operations, which converts a discrete sequence into a smooth-running, methodical process. Helping overcome obstacles with ease, smart assistants thus drive results and assure successful business ventures.
Never did we realize what we had conceptualized as a tool for social cause will also prove beneficial to businesses. Our flagship product, Bindu, is an AI-powered virtual assistant intended to assist blinds. It takes speech from a blind person and using deep learning and natural language processing (NLP) generates answers, so that the user can perform day-to-day actions much like an able-bodied person.
Organizations have been going open, and for many, disability is no longer a factor that can prevent a talent from adding value. And with smart assistants like Bindu, even blindness is no longer a hurdle, as proved by one of our clients, who successfully deployed it to harness the talent of its one visually impaired employee.
Well, smart assistants are to be like this, not just helping us and streamlining our actions, but actually overcoming every possible hurdle that things like disability may cause.
Here, in this blog, we shall discuss smart assistants in general and some of the crucial benefits they offer to today’s businesses.
What are smart assistants?
Smart assistants are applications that allow the users to interact with the devices using them through natural language. Users converse as if they are conversing with humans. Taking inputs in text or voice forms, smart assistants perform necessary tasks for users, thereby streamlining the users’ work, and offering them convenience.
What are the types of smart assistants?
There are two types of smart assistants, which are text-based smart assistants and voice-based smart assistants.
Text-based smart assistants make use of texts to understand and answer user queries. Chatbots, which are becoming commonplace, is the best example. Landing a website of an ITES or educational institute, the user finds a chatbot popped up, asking some questions. The chatbot is trained to direct the course of the interaction according to the nature of the response received from the user.
Voice assistants work as agents that speak out answers to questions. For effective functioning of the application and its use, they must be integrated into devices. Based on the purpose for which the smart assistant has been conceptualized, it can be compatible with PCs, cell phones, or specially configured devices.
How do smart assistants work?
Multiple processes go into the development of a smart assistant. These processes can be combined into the following four major stages. Of these, only the first three stages form text-based assistants.
Speech to text conversion
Deep learning (DL) implementation drives Natural Language Processing (NLP) to infer speech captured, which is converted into text.
Syntax Analysis and Semantic Processing
This works as a dual process. The first part analyzes syntax and identifies the structure of the sentence considering its grammar. Next, semantic analysis interprets the meaning for the words present in the sentence.
Interpreting and answering questions
Based on the previous steps, each question is examined to understand the intention, so that an appropriate answer could be given. Answering requires framing a correct sentence.
Text to speech conversion
As the final step, the derived answers are converted into audio. The audio mechanism enables the device to speak out the answer to the user.
Of course, these processes execute in quick succession, for one of the very purposes of using smart assistants is to optimize time. The application’s ability to rapidly serve the users is what basically qualifies the application as a “smart assistant”.
Know these 4 crucial benefits of smart assistants
Smart assistants bring a turnaround to your operational activities by helping you
Improve communication and coordination
A typical business value chain involves several activities that include regular conversations. Though essential, the static coordination activities, if handed over to a smart mechanism, saves important time of stakeholders, and allow them to utilize that time for executing their core responsibilities.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered virtual assistants thus set a path wherein stakeholders start having a streamlined experience. For instance, a predictive chatbot knows the probable question from the visitor and prepares an appropriate answer. This allows users to quickly resolve their doubts.
Strengthen the Analytics framework
With intelligent voice assistants (IVAs) at their disposal, analysts can fast drive analytical applications to derive required insight. IVA-driven business intelligence (BI) doesn’t require operational execution to filter dashboards and lookups for a required piece of data. Operating as a single unit, IVA provides analysts any-time access to requisite reports.
Virtual assistants (VAs) that offer multi-device support provide analytics and BI end-users the flexibility to track and monitor business trends in real-time. Besides relaying critical insights, VAs also alert stakeholders about important events and enables them take in-time actions.
Build a knowledge management ecosystem
At times, when you struggle to get answers, smart assistants might prove to be a recourse that offers the solution quickly. Learning continuously, smart assistants evolve over time and thus build up a knowledge base that stakeholders can tap in at any required instance.
VA-created knowledge bases prove beneficial, especially in a distributed setup, where you cannot easily reach colleagues, or each person is too occupied to be available at the required point of time. So, you simultaneously achieve two objectives – optimize time and efforts, and build a knowledge management system.
Drive excellent customer engagement
May it be AI-powered chatbots or Voice-AI, smart assistants, in any form, disrupts customer engagement, for they personalize the buying journeys, thereby winning user confidence. Juniper Research’s findings of Voice AI business to be around $80 billion annually by 2023, is good enough to prove that VAs enhance customer engagement.
Virtual assistants intelligently cross-promote products or services that are relevant to the discussion going on with customers. Thus, in this way, they empathize with customers and create a positive impact.
Conclusion
If you are considering implementing AI for your business, then smart assistants, automatically, get enlisted in your objectives. With technological evolution, the definition of customer satisfaction, too, is undergoing rapid change. Intelligent Virtual Assistants are apt to deal with such sophisticated requirements.
With virtual assistants emerging as saviors, there is no limit to which they can prove useful to enterprises. At a time when a delay of 10 minutes reduces the chances of securing potential customer contact by a massive 400%, an AI-powered assistant can help not just amass contacts but also offer an impressive experience.