Conversational AI

Table of Contents

1. What is Conversational AI
2. What are the benefits to conversational AI tools?
3. What is BERT?
4. How to Create Conversational AI

What is conversational AI?

Conversational AI...it's the concept of being able to make machines capable of understanding, processing, and responding to the human language properly. It's what powers a virtual agent and/or chatbot and is used to enable communication between computers and humans. It uses various technologies such as automatic speech recognition (ASR), natural language processing (NLP), advanced dialog management, and machine learning (ML) in order to understand and react from every interaction correctly.

With NLP, there are four steps:

Input generation

This is where the user provides any type of input in the format of voice and/or text.

Input analysis

The conversational AI then will use natural language understanding (NLU) to decipher the meaning of the input.

Dialogue management

Here, natural language generation (NLG) formulates the response.

Reinforcement learning

Lastly, the machine learning algorithms will refine the responses over time to ensure its accuracy.

If you are interested to seeing a deeper understanding on NLP vs NLU vs NLG, here's an article I wrote up in the past:

Note: All four of these steps usually take up about 300 milliseconds!! For an AI to replicate human-like interactions, the number of calculations and sequences the algorithms would have to run all has to be done within 300 milliseconds or less. If it takes any longer for each model to run respectively within the 300, the response ends up being too sluggish and the conversation becomes unnatural.

What are the benefits to conversational AI tools?

It saves time

A chatbot or virtual assistant is a great way to ensure that customer service experiences are 100% A+ grade quality 100% of the time. It ensures everyone's needs are attended without ever needing to question if you are overextending yourself and/or your team.

Rapid response rates

Customers are busy and impatient — giving them quick responses is one of the clearest ways you can make their experience more delightful. Conversational AI may also play an important role in educating users through helpful prompts and probing questions.

Increased accessibility

Chatbots and virtual assistant are on the clock 7 days a week for 24 hours each day. If a customer or client needs help outside of your regular hours, a chatbot is able to attend to their issues if it is able to.

Increased sales

While being available outside of business hours in order to help with questions, the chatbots and virtual assistants are able to increase your sales. There are minimal processes chatbots may be able to help clients with when a representative is not available in order to promote the business.

No language barrier

Thanks to translation software, conversational AI eliminates language barriers. This makes your business more approachable to a larger variety of customers.

What is BERT?

BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) is a large, computational intensive model that set the state of the art for natural language understanding when it was released. It can be applied to a broad range of language tasks such as reading comprehension, sentiment analysis, or question and answer. It has been trained on a massive corpus of 3.3 billion words of English text to understand language and has the capability to train on unlabeled datasets with minimal modification.

How to Create Conversational AI

1. Find the list of frequently asked questions (FAQs) for your end users

• How do I access my account?
• Where do I find my routing and account number?
• When will my debit card arrive?
• How do I activate my debit card?
• How do I order checks?
• How do I talk to a local banker?

2. Use FAQs to develop goals in your conversational AI tool

3. Use goals to understand and build out relevant nouns and keywords

4. Put it all together to create a meaningful dialogue with your user