Building conversational voice bots

nutanc
nutanc
Sep 6, 2018 · 2 min read

Voice is the new sexy. Thanks to devices like Alexa and Google Home, voice apps have again become popular. And though we still don’t have a killer app for these devices yet(most use it to play music or set alarms), there are enough indications that this is the future.

Almost all the big brands have jumped on the bandwagon and have released an Alexa app and a Google home app. This shows the effect of the great marketing and sales power of the Amazon and Google teams. But in their enthusiasm to build the next cool thing, most companies are forgetting the biggest distribution channel for their conversational voice bots, the simple phone.

And the funny thing is, with the current technology available, building a conversational bot for the phone is easier than building for Alexa or Google.

A combination of cloud telephony, speech APIs, NLP, and text to speech make it possible to build conversational voice bots for the phone easy.

Alexa devices and Google home devices maybe there in the millions. But the number of phones in world is expected to pass 5 billion soon. And the phone app is available on all phones, smart as well as dumb. There is nothing to install and everyone knows how to make a call.

Why would you neglect that market? And if you already have an Alexa app then refactoring the code to make it work as a phone app is anyway mostly a day’s work.

So in the coming few days I will be continuing this series on building conversational bots for the phones. I will be writing about steps to create such bots with concrete examples, voice user interface, disadvantages of phone bots, current cutting edge research on bot technology.

Please feel free to join the ride :)

nutanc

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nutanc

Love software and love building software products. Blog at http://t.co/yICZVFPd