Google’s I/O conference is usually a hotbed of innovations. But for 2018, Google literally blew the minds of enthusiasts not just at the venue but worldwide when it unveiled the Duplex an AI-powered conversational feature that would soon be a part of the Google Assistant we use in our phones as well as on Google Search. Duplex is the closest AI has come in the race to be humanized. It can intelligently handle telephone conversations for users. Sundar Pichai, CEO – Google, demonstrated a videotaped conversation between Duplex and some common services that people often make reservations for like a Salon appointment as well as a table reservation in restaurants. Though this scenario could be handled somewhat smoothly by existing AI-powered chatbots and personal assistant software, Duplex stood out with its ability to strike meaningful conversations and even cater to nuances in the human speech. It made sounds like “mmm-hmm”, “err” to make the conversation as human as possible.
In short, such a platform could easily be used for tons of meaningful conversational scenarios across sectors. While many applauded this technology, there were some who raised objections to privacy and ethics. Google later clarified these concerns and said that Duplex would first introduce itself to the recipient that it is a personal assistant and then only make conversations. This post is from the best artificial intelligence development company Perfomatix.
Our intention was not to run an entire blog around Google Duplex but to demonstrate how close AI is to becoming lifelike and very soon the word “Artificial” might be axed from AI. It will be intelligence, like human intelligence and perhaps with more factual correctness and guaranteed results. We look at the top 3 hottest possibilities that can be explored with advanced AI platforms like Google Duplex soon:
Booking Platforms
Google showed how to make table reservations with Duplex. The same principle works well with booking platforms as well with a slight modification where the AI assistant becomes the receiver when you call up for booking. The booking platform can understand your needs, allot the seats of your preference if available and then confirms the booking, sends an email with payment link and after it’s done, sends you your tickets via SMS or Email or both. And what can you book with such a platform you may ask! Well, almost anything from a movie on Friday night to a weekend concert, a flight ticket or even a customized holiday package for your honeymoon. Conversational AI platforms would be able to understand even the most skewed voice conversations and understand the intent of your booking. It could even chip in a few offers should it sense that you are drifting away from a booking that was almost confirmed.
Intelligent Customer Service Centres
From gadgets to detergents, today consumers call up brand customer service centres for all sorts of grievances and concerns they have. Enterprises need to have an army of customer support associates ready to attend the huge influx of calls in addition to deploying teams to assist email queries and real-time chat. A great deal of these services-related conversations both voice-based and textual can be handled by intelligent conversational platforms. The platform could be trained on all aspects of a product or service that it is associated with and it can answer customer queries as diligently as possible. From a cost perspective, the entire centre can be managed by the platform rather than 100’s of customer associates. Also, the platform can be integrated with other information systems and pull up any info needed in real time thereby eliminating wait time for customers. Human intervention can be avoided as much as possible if linguistic training is imparted to these conversational AI assistants to recognize local dialects and nuances. Besides these, AI platforms can connect with IoT enabled smart home appliances and run routine maintenance checks remotely. This would open up new horizons of in-home customer service satisfaction levels.
Read: Benefits of using machine learning for IT event management
Smarter homes
On an average, we witness an increase of over 64% in the number of smart home devices being shipped globally every year. From Amazon’s Alexa to Google’s Home, today smart assistants can do chores for you like reminders, alarms, playing your music, turning off the lights, and even teach your kids some manners. Add to that, the long list of smart home appliances like refrigerators, washing machines, microwaves, air conditioners, etc. you are looking at a future where you simply walk in and walk out of your house while it does all the home management for you. Engineers are already working on personal assistant robots that could do physical chores like taking your clothes to the washing machine or giving you a good relaxing massage from the comfort of your homes and much more. To make everything less artificial, the conversational aspect that we discussed about Google Duplex, would be the key differentiator. We would no longer feel like giving inputs to machines as their responses would be hard to differentiate from those of humans.
For enterprises, these possibilities that AI will bring in are an opportunity to create exciting new customer experiences. The beauty of technology allows them to focus more on the experience while the execution is handled intelligently by AI. However, this requires an immense amount of data management and insight mining to ensure that AI systems make the best possible decisions from your enterprise and consumer data. This is made possible by AI platforms like Dataramp, that sweep through huge volumes of data in an enterprise to arrive at meaningful decisions. Write to us to know how we can help your enterprise achieve the most successful AI roadmap for operations.
