What Is Conversational AI

sasha uritsky

Dec 30, 2017

Conversational Artificial Intelligence solutions can communicate with people in their natural languages. The interactions happen via speech or text – our most common forms of interaction.

The most popular example of a conversational AI solution is chatbot.

The chatbot popularity began in 2016 with Facebook’s announcement of a developer-friendly platform to build chatbots on Facebook messenger. Soon, chatbots became the buzz of the technological community and spread across various industries. As a next step, toolkits that helped build a bot in five minutes grew popular, companies raced to the market with new bot announcements and the world woke up to a new chatbot-based reality.

A well developed conversational AI chatbot is able to interact on a near-human level. If we think about it, most companies’ customer service and sales centers deal with a core of 6-12 repeating issues. conversational AI software allows companies to develop an intelligent response channel that can cover the most common customer interactions.

Another advantage in using Conversational AI is in the marketing and branding domain. Chatbots allow the companies to stay on their message without veering off course . With AI, the scripts are all written and approved in house. Even when the AI system learns, when the appropriate training techniques are implemented, the system will adhere to the required profrssional verbiage.

Interested in reading more? Check out our other blogs:

Easy Yet Untapped Revenue Channel for Hotels Worldwide

There are many travelers looking for hotels and places to stay on social web. Every day.

Take Twitter, for example:

Or this:

People are genuinely looking for help. Surprisingly though only few are getting it. According to nmodes data less than 12% of Twitter travel requests are being answered. The rest - lost opportunities for hotels and businesses in the hospitality industry.

And how big is this opportunity anyway?

nmodes Twitter data shows that every 15 min somebody expresses intent of going to, or visiting New York. Most of these travelers need a place to stay there.

Every 33 min - intent of traveling to London.

Every 54 min - intent of traveling to Paris.

We started Twitter recommendation service @nmodesHelps and were encouranged by the results. 72% of those that received our travel recommendations reacted by thanking us and expressing their gratitude. This reinforced our assumption that people seek travel advice on Twitter, accept it as an instant value, and are prepared to act upon it.

The hotels that are ready to move fast to monetize this opportunity will benefit the most.

When Big Data is not so big anymore

We are inundated with information. There is so much information around us they coined a special term - Big Data. To emphasize the sheer size of it.

It is, of course, a problem - to deal with a large amount of data. Various solutions have been created to address it efficiently.

At nmodes we developed a semantic technology that accurately filters relevant conversations. We applied it to social networks, particularly Twitter. Twitter is a poster child of Big Data. They have 500 million conversations every day. A staggering number. And yet, we found that for many topics, when they are narrowed down and accurately filtered, there are not that many relevant conversations after all.

No more than 5 people are looking for CRM solutions on an average day on Twitter. Even less - two per day on average - are asking for new web hosting providers explicitly, although many more are complaining about their existing providers (which might or might not suggest they are ready to switch or looking for a new option).

We often have businesses coming to us asking to find relevant conversations and expecting a large number of results. This is what Big Data is supposed to deliver, they assume. Such expectation is likely a product of our ‘keyword search dependency’. Indeed, when we run a keyword search on Twitter, or search engines, or anywhere we get a long list of results. The fact that most of them (up to 98% in many cases) are irrelevant is often lost in the visual illusion of having this long, seemingly endless, list in front of our eyes.

With the quality solutions that accurately deliver only relevant results we experience, for the first time, a situation when there are no longer big lists of random results. Only several relevant ones.

This is so much more efficient. It saves time, increases productivity, clarifies the picture, and makes Big Data manageable.

Time for businesses to embrace the new approach.