Taking Conversational AI to the next level — what to expect?
As of early 2020, more than one in two Americans (~63%) have used Conversational AI, and majority of them reported to have used it on their smartphone. It is no longer unusual to see people interact with their Siri, Alexa, and other forms of virtual assistant. But, why only 63%? Shouldn’t the number be higher? Wasn’t ‘Eliza’, the very first Chatbot, invented in 1964?
(Statista 2021)
What we mean and don’t mean by Conversational AI
Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) refers to technologies which users can talk to. According to recent research by IBM, Conversational AI uses large volumes of data, machine learning, and natural language processing to help imitate human interactions, recognizing speech and text inputs and translating their meanings across various languages. Conversational AI is also designed to analyze the sentiments using languages, for example, Alexa has tone-detecting feature that will make it apologize if the user sounds frustrated. In this article, we do not refer to Chatbots which are rule-based and mainly used for repetitive tasks.
Conversational AI is at a nascent stage and is all around us. They can be found in our homes, cars, call centers, banks, and medical centers, starting from virtual chats to voice-operated personal assistants. The use cases have been growing fast over the past years. For example, in a little over three years after the launch, one of the largest Conversational AI devices, Amazon’s Alexa, has gone from having 130 skills to over 100,000 skills as of September 2019. In addition, According to Conversational Commerce Report 2018 from Capgemini Digital Transformation Institute, nearly 28% of the active banking and insurance service users are currently using a voice assistant to make a transaction in the U.S.
What to expect over the next several years?
According to Meticulous Research, the voice and speech recognition market is expected to grow at a 17.2% compound annualized rate to reach $26.8 billion by 2025, with over 50% of customers expecting a business to be open 24/7. This promising growth could potentially come from three key areas:
1. ‘Clone’ of Advisors
Imagine having access to speak to your banker–not a virtual chatbot– 24/7? We are SO close to that stage. In 2018, UBS, one of the largest Investment Banks, launched UBS Companion, a ‘clone’ of senior banker to give advice to customers quicker but still providing option to speak to a human being. This service is driven by artificial intelligence and voice-recognition technology developed by IBM, and likely to be rolled out to a broader part of financial services.
Similarly, in Healthcare, during the pandemic, Orbita, the leading provider of HIPAA-compliant conversational voice and chat solutions for healthcare organizations, launched OrbitaENGAGE, newly updated digital front door offering a seamless experience for patients at every point in their care journey, guiding and directing existing patients to the right level of care and resources based on their needs. We expect to see more and smarter AI-powered conversational technologies across industries.
2. ‘Smarter’ Personal Assistants
Studies have shown that on average every individual in the US spends 3.5 hours a day checking and replying to emails. That’s almost 23 business days per year. Imagine if your Alexa could read the email from a friend who wanted to schedule lunch and reply with some open slots based on your availability in your calendar? Or, instead of spending 30 minutes on the phone with your airline’s customer service trying to change your flight, have you ever thought about having Alexa to do that?
While voice-operated personal assistants help the users to solve relatively simple tasks, such as checking the weather and playing music, we can expect to see an increasing need for all these voice-operated personal assistants to help with more complicated tasks in the future enabling users to focus more on higher value-add activities.
3. ‘Reincarnation’ of your deceased loved ones
In the movie ‘Her’ robotic companionship seemed far-fetched when the film came out in 2013, but when this year’s pandemic locked millions down into isolation, hundreds of thousands downloaded Replika, a voice and chatbot phone app that provides friendship and human-like conversation with the aims to help people deal with their problems, loneliness, and mental health. This app has seen a 35% increase to 7 million users during the pandemic. Users can pick their preference on companion’s gender, voice, appearance, etc.
With the rise of voice cloning technologies, it is not impossible to expect your loved ones to be your companion. Imagine having your deceased mother’s face and voice in your Replika app? Or having your long-distance spouse’s voice for your Siri or Alexa? This conversational AI is here to provide not only personal and professional, but also emotional support.
What to prepare for the future
IBM spoke to 30 experts to understand some of the catalysts for the next AI breakthroughs. We need deep learning that could demonstrate a strong ability to help machines with reasoning — a skill that is very important to advance many AI applications to include basic common sense, dealing with challenging situation, and making complex decisions. Experts highlight the need for more efficient training deep learning models to apply them at scale across increasingly more complex and diverse tasks, particularly through the use of “small data” and more unsupervised learning. In addition, a combination of efficient algorithms and new AI hardware would improve computational power, which could drive the next AI leaps.
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