Alterra.ai launches its AI-driven Alterra Answer Bot for Drift
Alterra.ai has built an AI-driven virtual sales rep that can answer customers’ questions about a business and its products NOW. Drift is a leading conversational sales and marketing platform that helps over 100,000 businesses connect with their customers NOW, via live chat with actual sales reps, right on the company’s website. This reduces the B2B sales cycle from weeks to minutes.
With the launch of its Answer Bot on the Drift platform, Alterra.ai accelerates the sales cycle even further — the bot answers customers’ questions in milliseconds and never sleeps, delivering on the promise of NOW 24/7, even when live reps are not available.
When live reps are on duty, the Alterra Answer Bot works on instantly qualifying leads, so reps only spend time with prospects who are ready to buy. Using advanced Machine Learning algorithms, the bot filters out spam and irrelevant chatter and automatically reroutes inquiries that lack purchasing intent, away from sales and on to support, accounting and other departments.
Unlike many other bots, the Alterra Answer Bot doesn’t rely on on-screen buttons. Through the use of Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing, it can understand everyday English questions and find answers in FAQs and knowledge bases. No coding is required: no rules, no regular expressions, not even writing storybooks — the AI learns from conversations between humans — customers and live reps.
To make this “learning instead of coding” possible, the Alterra team has developed a number of new algorithms for its proprietary NLP Engine. One of them, phrase2vec, a sentence embedding algorithm, extends famous word2vec from single words to whole phrases. This helps the bot to find answers by meaning, not keywords. For example, if the user asks, “How can I call you?” the Alterra Answer Bot will be able to find the “Our phone number is 1 (800) 555–1212” answer in the client’s FAQ, even though the question and answer have no words in common.
In the last five years, Deep Learning took Machine Learning by storm, improving the quality of tasks such as image and voice recognition, and machine translation from about 70% to over 90%. Now, the same revolution happens in NLP. In situations where old-school bots would typically correctly respond in 25% to 50% of the cases, the Alterra Answer Bot can master up to 90% accuracy, the highest in the industry.
As a Drift plugin, the bot is installed directly from the official Drift app store. The app imports the business’s FAQ or knowledge base and automatically converts them to an intelligent question-answering bot.
Led by three ex-Googlers, Alterra.ai harnesses the power of Deep Learning to create AI assistants for every business — virtual reps that can answer questions about the company and its products, greet visitors, and help existing customers. To learn more about the company and its Answer Bot for Drift, ask the bot itself, always on duty at
https://next.alterra.ai/home/answer-bot/drift
