Voicebot: An Ultimate Guide

Whenever you hear Voicebot, the first thing that comes to your mind is Siri, Alexa, or Ok Google. These are the most convenient voice-powered tools that have become a huge part of our day-to-day life. But these are not only AI-powered tools, voicebots have multiple use cases and can be implemented to improve customer service.

In 2023 we will see the rise of AI Chatbots and Voicebots in various verticals like insurance, banking, fintech, retail, utilities, eCommerce, healthcare, and many more.

Read on to get to know about what is a voicebot? how voicebots work? Use cases of voice bots and much more in detail.

Table of content  

• What is Voicebot?  
• Types of Voicebots and their Use-cases.
• Benefits of Voicebot to business and customers.
• How do Voicebots work?
• Applications of Voicebot.

What is Voice bot?

Voicebot is an AI-powered software that allows users to communicate with machines(bot) in a natural language. Voicebot operates using below technologies:

• Natural Language Understanding (NLU)
• Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• Machine learning
• ASR (automatic speech recognition)
• TTS (Text to Speech)

When the user speaks something, ASR converts the speech into text and the converted text is understood through NLP (natural language processing). Then the appropriate answer is formulated and converted into speech using Text to Speech (TTS) and the user gets an appropriate response for the query.

Voicebot understands user queries with the help of artificial intelligence and responds to the user. With time, the application of Voicebots is increasing - Voicebots are not limited to just virtual voice assistants, such as Alexa, Siri, or Google Assistants.

Voicebots have multiple benefits to customers and businesses, for instance in contact centers, the user needs to go through interactive voice response(IVR) by pressing keys as per the instructions, Unlike IVRs, the customers can talk in natural, human language with voicebots.

With time, the application of Voicebots is increasing - Voicebots are not limited to just virtual voice assistants, such as Alexa, Siri, or Google Assistants.

Some contact centers, for instance, have deployed Voicebots instead of human agents to have conversations with customers. Unlike IVRs, the customers can talk in natural, human language instead of pressing keys.

Types of voice bot

According to the application, voicebots can be bifurcated as below:

• Conversational AI Voicebot Integrated with Contact Center for Inbound and Outbound call automation  
• WhatsApp Voicebot  
• Chatbot with Voice AI  
• Voice AI-based Smart assistants  

Voicebot integrated with a contact center for Inbound and Outbound call automation   

AI Voice bot integrated with the contact center uses AI-based 2-way conversational voice as a medium to communicate with the customer. It can automate inbound and outbound calls without any human intervention. It can also transfer the call to a human agent upon the customer’s request. Voicebot can be implemented as per the industry-specific use cases.

Use Cases of Inbound Calls 

• Customer Support  
• Sales Inquiries   
• Customer Inquiries   
• Employee IT Helpdesk  
• Lead Qualification  
• Customer Engagement  
• Insurance Renewal  
• Claims FNOL Insurance Filing  
• Claim Status Enquiry  
• Investigation & Verification  
• Claim Settlement and More  

Use Cases of Outbound Calls 

• Automate Tele-Marketing Calls   
• Payment & renewal reminder 
• Debt collection   
• Cross-sell and upsell   
• Marketing automation 

Whatsapp Voicebot (Whatsapp bot driven by voice/text input)  

Nowadays providing Whatsapp support is a trend for businesses, businesses want to connect with their users through one of their most-used apps. And that can be easily achieved by implementing Whatsapp voicebot.

Whatsapp allows users to send voice inputs or voice commands to the bot. If the Floatbot platform detects Voice AI-based input, then the bot will answer with Voice + Chat reply in the text as well as voice form.   

Chatbot with Voice AI  

A chatbot with voice AI is a chatbot that can accept voice as input. The user can use the microphone option available to ask their queries and the bot can reply in chat+/voice form as required by the user. Floatbot allows voice-based input with streaming. Along with voice the bot also accepts text inputs. The benefit of a Chatbot is it can act as Voice AI-based virtual assistant and can give replies in a chat-based rich format as well as voice.

Voice AI-based Smart Assistants  

Voice AI-based smart assistants work purely with voice. The response from this bot is always voice-based. Amazon Echo and Google Homes are examples of Voice AI-based Smart Assistants. The introduction of such voice AI-based assistants extended the reach of communication that was limited to mobile devices once. Bot developed in the Floatbot platform can be real-time integrated with smart assistants such as Amazon Echo and Google Home. 

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF VOICEBOT TO BUSINESSES AND CUSTOMERS?

Like chatbots are evolving, so are voicebots. Voice bots eliminate the barrier between languages and smart-phone or any smart device such as a tablet or computer. Voicebots can be operated with the simplest phone with any network connection. Hence, a Voice bot has become one of the preferred ways to communicate in the current era. Voicebots are easy to interact with even for the older generation. 

A voicebot can help businesses and customers in multiple ways.

Benefits for business

• A voicebot can automate important and time-consuming tasks.
• Send personalized reminders.
• Improved customer experience.
• Reduces labor time and cost.
• Increase in customer engagement.

Benefits for customers

• Queries get resolved in no time
• Reduced waiting time
• Gets personalized messages and reminders
• Convenience in communication – as it understands natural language

Voicebot makes your product or service easy to use and easy to buy by providing information and the convenience to interact in natural language.

HOW DOES VOICEBOTS WORK?  

Voicebots can understand natural language and communicate with users via voice. A Voice bot can listen to and understand the commands given by the user and responds with the relevant answer without human intervention.   

A few of the deep-tech AI modules used in Voicebot include:  

Speech to Text 

The Speech to text module converts the natural speech (audio spoken by the user) to text, it works fine even in noisy environments. Typically, the Speech to Text module is developed with end-to-end deep learning-based speech recognition. It can recognize and understand different accents and languages.  

Text to Speech  

The TTS (Text to speech) module can generate human speech from text input. AI response is received by TTS and the text is converted to speech which is transmitted to the user over call. 

NLP/NLU Engine  

Voice bots are layered with an NLP engine to create human-like conversations. The bot can understand all possible questions, words, and sentences that the user speaks. The user conversation with a bot is converted and sent to the bot’s AI. AI detects the user query and sends the response to TTS. With the help of AI, customers can talk freely with the bot instead of giving yes or no responses. The bot can identify the intent of the customer’s commands/requests and respond instantly with the appropriate reply.

Language Detection  

The AI Voice bot can recognize the language and dialect of the user and seamlessly switch to the language used by the user. This will ensure that there is no language barrier and that the customer can talk freely with the bot. 

Machine Learning  

The Voice bot auto-learns from the user’s data and queries. It uses deep learning and machine learning-based modules to self-learn from the available user queries and add to its knowledge base. 

Other critical modules include:  

Bot interruption technology  

The bot interruption technology helps the Voicebot to respond to unexpected user interruptions during ongoing conversations. When the user interrupts in between the conversation, the bot will stop speaking, listen to what the user is saying and respond accordingly. 

Answering Machine Detection  

The AI-powered voice bot can easily identify whether the call is picked up by a human or an answering machine. The bot will automatically hang up the call if the answering machine is detected.   

APPLICATIONS OF VOICE BOT  

Voicebots can become very useful for businesses across all industries as they can save the time required for customer service. Below are the industry-specific use cases in which voicebot can be implemented.  

Banking  

• Automated banking services

For a customer before proceeding with the bank it is important to get all the information related to banking services such as loans, cheques, cards, etc. that can be provided over a voicebot, which can be referred as a banking automation bot.

• Customer support with intelligent assistants

In case a user wants support over a call then a voicebot automates the call and provides a desired response for the query, this would eliminate human support hence saving cost and time.

• Improved security with voice biometrics

With the latest AI tech, it is possible to get voice authentication over a call for security reasons. A voicebot created using Floatbot’s platform allows adding voice biometrics that makes a voicebot safe and secure for banking purposes.

• Improved customer interactions with native languages

Multi-lingual capabilities of a voice bot enable users to interact in native languages. This makes customer interaction smooth and comfortable with a bot.

Insurance  

• Automated sales journey

A voicebot can replace a traditional way of filling an insurance policy form in a more interactive manner that helps a user to save time filling a lengthy list of questions for a policy. With the easier and more interactive approach, the sales journey becomes more robust resulting in an increased number of conversations through a voicebot.

• Automated claims FNOL process.

With the traditional approach for the FNOL process, a customer calls the insurance company and talks to their agent, and provides all the information, in which if the agents are busy then the customer needs to wait. Whereas with the voicebot, there is no waiting time for the customers, and for the company, it becomes an automated process saving cost and time of their agents.

• Customer support

In the insurance sector, an emergency can occur at any time and a voicebot is an AI automation tool, hence it is available 24x7 for the customers to answer their queries at any given time. It not only provides the answers to the queries but also connects to a human agent when required.

• Lead generation

Generating leads is a kind of tedious and endless task for a sales team, if they adopt the power of Artificial Intelligence by implementing a voice bot then this task can become more smooth and more interactive. Whenever a salesperson calls a prospect, either the prospect is not interested or it will not take the call seriously. But if a voicebot calls the prospect then it grabs their attention and a prospect would like to know more about the call and the offer.

TO WRAP UP  

With the development of Artificial Intelligence, voicebots will play a crucial role in automation of various important areas for a business. The major trend we are going to see in 2023 is the combination of voice and chat as one conversational AI tool for automation.

If you would like to adopt the power of AI voicebot for your business, then do checkout Floatbot’s voicebot products and solutions. Floatbot provides a no-code, SaaS-based Voice AI platform that helps you build and deploy AI-Powered Voicebots and Chatbots without coding. We also provide deep-tech ASR and Voice Biometrics solutions.

To know more, please contact us at connect@floatbot.ai, and our team of experts will connect with you.