Voicebot vs Chatbot: Which One Is Better for You?

As artificial intelligence (AI) evolves, conversational AI Chatbots and Voicebots are becoming the top tech trend today. Typically, businesses leverage them as virtual agents to deal with high-volume customer interactions.

Voicebots and Chatbots have their upsides and downsides, but both are known for delivering exceptional customer experiences. They respond immediately to customers and are accessible 24x7 - arguably the top two characteristics that superior customer support should have.

Here are the key differentiators between Chatbot and Voicebot

Let us explore both in detail

What is a Voicebot?

Voicebot is a conversational interface that enables users to interact with computers using speech. It uses a set of technologies, such as automatic speech recognition (ASR), Text-to-Speech (TTS), neural networks, and natural language processing (NLP). Check out our ultimate guide on Voicebots for more details.

A typical Voicebot follows the following steps - 

1. When the user speaks to Voicebot, the ASR engine transcribes the spoken words into text.  
2. The transcribed text is passed to NLP(AI) engine. 
3. The AI engine processes the query and returns the appropriate answer in the form of text. 
4.  Then, the TTS engine converts the answer into speech. 

Benefits of Voicebot

Voice-Based Communication

One of the best advantages of a Voicebot is that it communicates through voice - the most natural mode of communication. Also, Voice communication is around three times faster than texting. 

Better Customer Engagement

Interacting with a Voicebot is similar to talking over a phone. The seamless, natural interaction can help you stand out from the competition.  

Voicebots have grown mature now, and they can be fun to interact with. You can train and teach them to be humorous and funny. 

Integrate with Voice Assistants

Integrating your Voicebot into voice assistants is a way of integrating customers on the channel they prefer. It leads to better engagement and more customer satisfaction.   

You can integrate your Voicebot into voice assistants, such as Alexa and google home, which is prolificating day-to-day.  

According to Voicebot.ai, 75% of families in the USA will own at least one smart speaker.

VOICEBOT CHALLENGES

For sophisticated applications, voicebot could not perform well. It might not understand complex conversations and need human intervention. 

Also, a Voicebot needs a clean dataset for training - it can be hard for different languages, accents, and dialects.  

What is a Chatbot?

Chatbot simulates a chat-based conversation and enables the user to text in natural language. Conversational AI, the technology underlying the Chatbot, ensures that the conversation is human-like.  

You can easily integrate Chatbots with websites, mobile apps, and messaging applications, such as Messenger and WhatsApp. Chatbot helps you automate your interactions with customers, enabling quality self-service. 

Benefits of a Chatbot

Address Sophisticated Use Cases

When it comes to handling complex chat flows, Chatbots prove their worth. They can display multiple options in Chat and simplify non-linear use cases. In the case of Voicebot, if you provide many options, it becomes tedious to remember them. 

Easier To Train

Training a chatbot is much easier in comparison to a Voicebot. The main reason is the availability of high volumes of text-based data, which is not the case for voice datasets.  

Also, it is far easier to understand the context and intent of the conversation in the text - no need to worry about the tone, modulation, and other aspects of a spoken sentence.   

Send Audio-Visual Media

One more good thing about Chatbot is that you can send audio-visual media, such as images, videos, and GIFs, along with the text. This enhances the experience, leading to better engagement.  

HOW TO DECIDE WHICH CONVERSATION AI SOLUTION TO CHOOSE?

DECIDE YOUR GOAL

Your first deciding factor should be to check your goal for implementing a bot. Your goals could be – to provide customer support, help users find information related to your product or service, user engagement, lead generation, etc.
Based on your automation goal, you can decide on use cases for your business where the bot will play a crucial role.

BUSINESS TYPE

The next step is to get a reality check about the type and size of your business. Whether you own a B2C or B2B business, are you a growing business or a start-up?

HOW DO YOUR CUSTOMERS WANT TO GET IN TOUCH WITH YOU?

Know your customer’s preferred way to communicate with your business. For instance, if you often get queries over calls than by website or any other means then phone calls are the preferred way of communication for you.
Based on your user requirements, decide what will work best for your business.

HOW A BOT WILL HELP YOUR BUSINESS?

Adopting new technology for any kind of business can be only helpful when it is cost-effective and time-saving. Think about how a bot will help you automate certain areas of your business and will help you save time and money.
The above questions will help you decide whether to go with a Voicebot or a Chatbot solution for your business.

Conclusion

Both the conversational AI technology solutions – Voicebot and Chatbot are the best in their way, both have their advantages and limitations, it depends on the type of problem you are trying to solve for your business and its implementation. Choosing the right solution will lead you to save time and money for your resources.   

The best way to conclude is to understand which solution, voicebot vs chatbot, provide more value to your customers. 

Still not able to decide what AI solution you should go for?

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