What are Chatbots and Conversational AI and How do they Differ?

What are Chatbots?

It’s incredible to see how artificial intelligence has advanced, enabling bots to respond to questions and recognize user input with natural language processing. Chatbots are computer programs that stimulate human conversations through voice commands or text chats. They can be used to create or enhance customer service on websites, apps, or messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger.

Chatbots can be used in different ways, such as,

• Answering simple questions about the organization, like “Where is an organization located?”
• Providing updates on the company’s latest product or service
• Offering tips and advice on how to use the company’s products or services
• Promoting contests or sweepstakes
• Offering customer support by answering questions about products and services
• Automating processes that take a long time and notifying the user of the progress

With chatbots, you can create a personalized experience for each customer, even when dealing with large volumes of inquiries. They understand the user’s intent and respond accordingly. The best chatbots can handle complex tasks like booking a flight or ordering a pizza.

Conversational AI takes things one step further by not only understanding the user’s intent but also the context of the conversation. Unlike traditional chatbots, conversational AI is designed to handle more complex tasks and provide a smooth conversation flow.

What is Conversational AI?

Conversational AI can recognize and respond to speech and text inputs. It is designed to provide a more natural way for people to interact with computers, especially in customer service. The use of conversational AI has been on the rise with the introduction of voice recognition software.

Conversational AI systems are often used to build chatbots, which are computer programs that can mimic human conversation. However, chatbots are only one type of conversational AI system. Other types of conversational AI systems may be used for tasks such as customer service, data entry, or even health care.

Chatbot vs. Conversational AI

Chatbots’ ability to interpret human language has been improved by conversational AI, which allows them to provide more personalized, two-way interactions. Natural language processing (NLP), speech-to-text conversion, text-to-speech conversion, and machine learning (ML) are some of the applications of conversational AI.

NLP (Natural Language Processing)

If a question is asked outside the algorithms’ appropriate framework, the chatbots are unable to answer it.

A conversational AI system works by processing natural language and responding to it with human touch using machine learning, deep learning, and predictive analytics. It learns from past queries and searches and reverts accordingly.

Conversational AI considers a customer’s past conversations, chats, queries, purchases, and history, and offers personalized suggestions based on those. Hence, conversational AI outperforms chatbots in terms of contextual awareness.

Understanding Multiple Intents and Scalability

For example, if the query relates to two different aspects of customer support, the chatbot will not be able to comprehend it if it relates to two aspects. Instead, conversational AI platforms pick multiple requests and switch from topic to topic in between the conversation, which allows the user to avoid repeating the same question or query multiple times. Therefore, conversational AI is superior to chatbots in terms of multi-intent understanding.

With this technology, you can ensure that your customer service is consistent in quality and is able to handle scalability in terms of queries. In other words, conversational AI provides an omnichannel presence at scale.