Recent Innovations In Chatbots Across Various Industries

A chatbot is essentially a computer program written to copy a human and have a conversation with a human. While consumer chatbots like Siri and Alexa are gaining mass popularity, chatbots are also increasingly used in organizations like finance and banking institutions to handle repetitive customer queries. Business chatbots are usually designed to answer a very narrow field of questions, not unlike consumer voice assistants.

For example, Domino’s has a chatbot that allows you to order pizza through text. The bot mimics the conversation that you would have had with a human phone operator except, unlike a human operator, the bot would probably not be able to answer a non-pizza related question.

Let’s now delve deeper into the world of business chatbots and check out use cases in real-world applications.

Chatbots in Finance

RBS’s Cora

This chatbot used by the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is the first of its kind in the banking sector. Unlike earlier versions of chatbots like RBS’s, Luvo, Cora’s interface incorporates a digital human face. The bank took this step because their testing showed that people who had been avoiding the previous digital services had a higher probability to interact with a digital human face.

This technology, however, will not be replacing the existing channels that customers use to clear up their queries but rather release the pressure put on those channels. Cora will be able to answer all the simple questions while the complex ones will still be referred to employees of the bank.

Fidelity’s Cora

Cora, the virtual host of Fidelity is a proof-of-concept prototype created in partnership with Amazon’s new Sumerian VR and augmented reality developer tools. The chatbot is set in a 3-dimensional virtual reality room and is embodied in a carton human body.

The bot can answer questions about stock prices and uses its VR environment to project stock graphs on the many screens in the room around you. The chatbot isn’t scheduled to have a wide release but rather be a starting point if VR technology becomes big enough.

Chatbots in Healthcare

Florence

Many chatbots in the medical field share the same end goal: to able to give a simple diagnosis to a patient and refer them to a doctor if they need to.

“Florence” is one of these chatbots that acts as a medical assistant to anyone who uses it. It is still in its beta phase and operates out of messaging apps Facebook Messenger, Kik, and Skype.

The bot can perform functions like setting reminders to take medicine, taking symptoms and giving you a diagnosis with an explanation of what the diagnosis is, tracking your health, and finding you a doctor for a professional opinion.

Dragon Medical One

Like a lot of chatbots, the Dragon Medical One chatbot assists its user in a specific, usually tedious task. This chatbot helps physicians with their documentation by acting as a note-taking application.

It not only converts voice-to-text but also asks physicians clarifying questions on their documentation. The bot makes sure that the data it handles is accurate by filling in on things the physician may have missed.

Chatbots in Entertainment

Replika

Replika’s sole purpose is to act as your friend. Using AI and neural-networks, having conversations over time with this bot will result in the bot mimicking your patterns of speech.

The bot cannot perform any specific tasks but can rather have a general conversation with you. The bot’s creator Eugenia Kuyda views her bot as a program that satisfies the emotional need of its user instead of the informational and factual needs that many other chatbots addresses.

Genius

Thanks to National Geographic’s new show Genius you can now interact with Albert Einstein. This chatbot allows you to mimic a conversation with one of the smartest people who ever lived through the Facebook’s Messenger app.

You can ask the bot about different aspects of Einstein’s life and his accomplishments. The bot isn’t meant to be taken seriously as it jokes about Einstein’s hair and probably won’t be able to answer impossibly difficult physics questions.

Chatbots in Customer Service

Nina

Many companies are using chatbots to help with their customer service. Nina which was designed by Nuance, is one of these chatbots. The bot helps a company with many customer queries they receive. It acts as one of the first points of contact for customers and, like other bots, redirects the customer when it cannot answer complex queries.

These types of bots are truly useful for both the customer and the company. This usefulness was shown when Nina had “first contact resolution” 78% of the time in the three months of its use at Swedbank.

Chatbots in Legal

Parker

This chatbot was created by Norton Rose Fulbright, a law firm in Australia, in response to a change in privacy laws. The bot can answer simple questions on the changes to the laws, saving time for both the customers and the law firm. These kinds of chatbots are becoming increasingly common for law firms.

These chatbots act like the medical and financial bots in that they still cannot answer complex law questions, but the fact that the customers can find the answer to simple questions easier means that they will have a greater knowledge of the subject when they eventually do meet a lawyer.

Conclusion

The uses of chatbots seem to be on the rise everywhere, form professional industries like healthcare and banking to affecting us on the more personal and conversational level. Their effectiveness in answering basic questions in specific fields make them a valuable and positive addition to any company. And as showcased by Fidelity and Amazon, the future of chatbots looks very bright and seems as if they are truly here to stay.

Chatbots are not just used for entertainment purposes anymore. They are now increasingly beginning to invade the world of business as well, particularly in the customer service department across various industries.

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Written and edited by Radhika Madhavan at High Peak Software.