VOICE-ENABLED CHATBOTS V/S MESSENGER BOTS

Chatbots today have taken over the market by a great extent and have been increasing rapidly. People have now started collaborating with these bots into their businesses for extremely good results. Talking about the chatbots there are basically two types of conversations that can take place — text conversations and voice. Each of these two has its own pros and cons.

What exactly are the voice and text chatbots?

A text-based chatbot is the one that interacts and communicates through text or messaging. The conversation might include media, such as videos, images, UI elements etc.

Apart from being effective and efficient, text-based chatbots help in providing instant solutions, personalized experience to customers, gathering feedback and keeping the customers engaged.

Voice-activated chatbots are the ones who can interact and communicate through voice. They are capable of accepting the command in an oral or written form and reply through voice. This can be further categorized into two types — one which response via text and voice together and the other which response via voice only. The popular examples of voice-enabled chatbots are the Amazon Echo, Google Home and AI Timey.

These two types of chatbots can be easily merged with social media, messaging apps, SMS, emails and much more for the smooth running of the business.

Voice chatbot is a new technology coming up and has now predominantly taken over the text chatbot in a lot of areas whether it is travel, insurance, education and more.

Difference between voice and text chatbots:

The most significant difference between a text-based chatbot and a voice-activated chatbot is the way we interact with them. A text-based chatbot exists on various kinds of messaging platforms. It allows users to interact via text or button press.

On the other hand, a voice-based chatbot uses pre-recorded and text to speech responses to address the queries of the users. Projects like Siri, Cortana and Alexa demonstrate part of the vanguard of voice bot technologies.

Sentences in voice bots can also be longer because listening is easier and faster than reading. Most of the verbal tone in a chatbot is conveyed by the choice of words. In a voice bot, a good chunk of the tone is added by modulation.

One of the biggest differences between chatbot vs virtual assistant is the accessibility. A messenger chatbot might be more tempting to users because they can easily begin chatting with it on their phone. Interacting with a voice bot requires buying a new smart speaker device. Voice-activated chatbots are the ideal interface when hands-free interaction is necessary. These situations may include walking, the user step-by-step through a recipe when their hands are full etc.

Factors affecting the choice of the bot:

Which interface is the best depends largely on the purpose and context for a chatbot’s use? Both a voice-enabled chatbot and messenger chatbot allows the users to accomplish tasks and get the information.

Voice bots are a great choice if your user journey is fairly linear. While Text-based bots work great if there many potential paths a user can take. When there are a lot of options — like choosing from a menu, comparing different options, the chat is a much better UX than listening to something. Since the Quick Replies and carousels are on the screen, and you don’t have to mentally remember which options are available.

If we compare voice and text, voice can convey more information in a shorter attention span of the user. This means that while writing you take longer time in writing than conveying through speech. Along with this, you can use longer sentences through verbal communication than through chat, and you still won’t lose the user’s attention.

When to opt for a Text-Based chatbot:

There are certain scenarios which may help in understanding when to use a text-based chatbot for your business:

• Device-based inquires: When the company has its target audience who is always on the go, the text-based chatbot is very useful. When customers have device-based inquires text-based chatbots can begin with interacting and helping them to explore your offerings.
• Limited resources: Having a voice-based chatbot might be highly cost-intensive. Thus some of the small and medium businesses might not opt for that. For such businesses, a text-based chatbot is the best option.
• Small business: If the business is small and not very diversified, a text-based chatbot is ideal for the business needs.
• Screen presence: In some cases, your business requires a screen presence at all times since it is the demand for customer interaction. In such cases, text-based assistance is better.

When to opt for Voice-Based chatbots:

Voice-based chatbot shaves high level of interactive capability and because of that, they have gained a lot of popularity.

• Less of budget constraints: Incorporating a voice-based chatbot is a bit expensive. Thus it is better to have it when there are no budget constraints.
• Type of customers: Dealing with voice-activated chatbots is much more practical for people who are multitasking as well as have accessibility to a speaker. In such a scenario, a voice chatbot is more ideal in comparison to a text-based chatbot.

Is voice a better option?

It is very important that we engage customers. But having satisfactory engagement is difficult in a text conversation. This is because it requires patience, time and voiceless understanding of the discussion. Human conversations need substantial voice support to take major business decisions. Voice recognition chatbot offers new opportunities for personalization and intimate engagement for companies where such technology does a lot more than the traditional approach. The two-way chat happening between human and a robot is way too profound and eliminates many obstacles faced while dealing with customer requirements.

Unlike pure text-based chat solutions where the presence of a supporting device is must, intelligent voice chat robots do not latch on any special hardware devices. It simply gets rid of the physical means of interactions and costly customer engagement barriers.

Voice bots have now become an integral part of almost every customer-centric business. They are popularly used to assist agents by conversationally guiding customers to meet some of their needs. In order to meet the mark, bots need to have ‘smart’ (intuitive), smooth, seamless ‘conversations’ with customers.