KPIs, NLP training, validation & more

Anyone can build a chatbot. Most chatbot libraries have reasonable documentation, and the ubiquitous “hello world” bot is simple to develop. As with most things though, building an enterprise grade chatbot is far from trivial. In this post I’m going to share with you 10 tips we’ve learned through our own experience.

This is not a post about Google Dialogflow, Rasa or any specific chatbot framework. It’s about the application of technology, the development process and measuring success. As such it’s most suitable for product owners, architects and project managers who are tasked with implementing a chatbot.

1. Know (and measure) your KPIs

I’m stating the obvious here, but it’s really important to know what you want to achieve, and how this can be measured. Many of your KPIs will be sector or domain specific, but I will give you some chatbot specific KPIs to think about. Listed in order of importance:

User feedback — Ask your users if they are satisfied. This can be done during the dialog flow or at the end. Asking for feedback will give you two KPIs:

• Feedback rate — the percentage of users who provided feedback.
• Satisfaction rate — the percentage of those users who were satisfied. I generally recommend offering a binary choice “satisfied” vs “not satisfied” instead of a rating from 1 to 5, but the choice is yours.

Bounce rate — The percentage of users who abandon conversations midway.

Self service rate — The percentage of users who were able to achieve their goal without needing to chat, phone or email a human agent.

Return rate — The percentage of users who return to use the chatbot again.

Hourly usage distribution — When are people using your bot? A bot that serves customers 24/7 is especially valuable as it’s usually prohibitively expensive to provide human cover 24/7.

There are also a couple of technical KPIs to think about:

Model accuracy — If you are using natural language understanding to understand messages you will need to measure the accuracy of your models. This is a complex topic and is best left to data scientists and experienced developers. One word of caution — don’t get too hung up on the technical measures of accuracy. Ultimately it’s the business KPIs that matter. A model that is 98% accurate is no use if users are dissatisfied with the service.

Response times — Speed is not so important for a chatbot. You can work around slow performance by adding a “bot is typing” type message to dialogs. Sometimes we even fake a delay to make the bot seem more human. Nevertheless, you want to keep an eye on performance to maintain acceptable response times.

Finally, it’s important to know which channel your users favour if you deploy an omni-channel chatbot. Being dependent on one third party channel, e.g. Facebook Messenger puts you in a vulnerable position.

2. Use human agents first

Like most technology, a bot is designed to automate tasks that would otherwise be done by a human operator. Before embarking on a chatbot it’s essentials that you know exactly what you are trying to automate. The best way of doing this is to first employ human agents to respond to your users’ messages. Why do this?

To validate assumptions — you (or your product owner) may have established your use cases or user stories, but how valid are they? How many users actually choose live chat to check their order status?

The 80/20 rule — users will make all sorts of requests. Even for a particular use case, some requests will be so esoteric that it makes little sense to automate. For example — you will most likely want to handle postage and delivery type queries, but does your bot really need to handle queries about VAT on BFPO shipments? probably not.

To understand the tone of conversations — How do your users interact over live chat? are they friendly or professional, do they use colloquialisms? Do they use emojis and text speak? Understanding the tone of conversations will allow you to develop a chatbot that your users are comfortable using.

To get training data — This is probably the most important reason why you should use humans first. Even if you’re not planning to use natural language understanding you will still need data for keyword matching. If you are using NLU/NLP you will certainly need good training data. From what we’ve seen, 80% of chatbots fail to meet expectations because they used synthetic training data, or a limited sample of real world data.

You may already employ human agents to serve your customers. If so, you probably need to tweak the data you log, and the way it’s structured (see below). If you don’t yet employ human agents you can actually do this on a (relatively) small scale.

You don’t need to serve all your customers manually before switching to a chatbot. What you’re after is a representative sample. For example, you may display a “live chat now” button for one in 10 visitors.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. Chatbot Trends Report 2021

2. 4 DO’s and 3 DON’Ts for Training a Chatbot NLP Model

3. Concierge Bot: Handle Multiple Chatbots from One Chat Screen

4. An expert system: Conversational AI Vs Chatbots

3. Log (almost) everything

Ok, you need to be mindful of GDPR, so you can’t log everything. For your purposes we don’t actually need personally identifiable information. What you’re after is the phrases users use. In particular, you’re interested in:

1. intents — “i want to check my order status”. You can map intents to use cases/user stories.
2. entities — “yes, a jacket”. Entities (relevant nouns) form the basis of named entity recognition
3. parts of speech — “I want a black or white dress”. The adjectives, prepositions and conjunctions. You will use these to train your part of speech tagging models.
4. sentiment — “I’m not happy” or “thanks for your help”. You can use text classification and sentimental analysis to detect when users are satisfied or dissatisfied.

Ideally you will log conversations in a freeform database, something like elasticsearch would be great. It’s important to log not only the messages but the wider context. i.e. you want to tie messages together into a conversation threads and identify the participants (user vs agent). Log the conversations during the initial human pilot phase and also during the full implementation. You’ll want to continually evaluate, refine and improve.

You should also log key events such as clicks and conversions and along with metadata such as timestamps, device used, ip address etc. Just careful that you don’t breach GDPR via jigsaw identification

4. Make the most of your training data

If you’ve followed our first piece of advice, you should have some decent training data. Now it’s time to put it to use.

You may want to split the conversations into 3 parts:

1. intro — the first couple of messages e.g. “I want to check my order status”. Useful for intent and entity analysis
2. body — e.g. “last Monday”. These messages may contain additional entities
3. sign-off — last couple of messages e.g. “thanks for your help”. Useful for sentimental analysis

Next, apply clustering on the intro messages to identify common intents and entities. Following the 80/20 rule this will tell you where to focus your efforts.

Finally, use the data to train and test your NLU models or keyword matching algorithms. Take care when splitting the training and test datasets.

As mentioned in the first section, you may also want to analyse the data to understand the tone of the conversations. This will be useful when thinking how to word the questions your bot will ask.

5. Think about validation and error handling

Experienced IT professionals think carefully about validation and error handling when building apps or websites. You can usually rely on the UI to help enforce constraints. For example, by using a dropdown select box with the valid options. The challenge arises when trying to enforce the same constraints in a chatbot.

Quick replies

Some channels offer quick replies— prefilled responses which can act as a replacement for select dropdowns, radio buttons and checkboxes. Quick replies can be used as a means of constraining user behaviour, but should be used with care. Unlike dropdown boxes, the options are typically displayed horizontally or vertically and take up valuable screen real estate, especially on mobile devices. This makes them suitable for responses with only a few options.

In most cases you won’t be able to use quick replies. Even if they are a feasible option, a chatbot with lots of quick replies is nothing more than an app with a poor UI. As the name implies, quick replies should be used to help users respond quickly. They exist to make life easier for users, not developers.

Message validation

Free text entry is at the heart of a chatbot. It’s unconstrained, so good validation and error handling is especially important. Remember — whilst your NLU model may correctly identify an entity, this doesn’t mean your downstream systems can handle it. 100 pounds or last monday are examples of entities that an NER model will probably recognise, but need transforming for downstream consumption.

6. Think how to handle more than one message

Here’s the typical chatbot flow:

• Ask question
• Process reply

The problem arises when your users don’t send a single message in reply to the question but several. Let’s take this simple example of a dialog between a customer and a human agent:

Agent: hello how can i help?
User:  hi
User:  i want to check my order status
User:  order A123

Now let’s see how this might look with a naive bot:

Bot:  hello how can i help?
User: hi
Bot:  Sorry i dont understand
User: i want to check my order status
User: order A123

The bot asks the user a question, then tries to infer intent from the reply “hi”. It can’t make sense of this, so generates an error. There are a few workarounds:

Support chit chat

Basically you train the chatbot to recognise “chit chat” type messages, which it can either reply to or simply ignore. Taking the example above, the bot would either ignore the “hi” or reply with “hello”. Either way, it wouldn’t generate an error.

Buffer incoming messages

Buffer all incoming messages. Wait until N seconds have elapsed since the last message. At this point concatenate all the buffered messages together into a single message and process it. Taking the above example it would look like:

Bot:  hello how can i help?
User: hi
User: i want to check my order status
User: order A123
(wait N seconds)
Bot:  Ok …

If the channel allows, you may be able to monitor the “user is typing” notification instead, setting N to a lower value. The downside to this approach is that the user always has to wait N seconds for a response which makes the bot seem unresponsive.

Buffer but short circuit

The same approach as described above, but instead of always waiting N seconds, you try to process the message buffer every time a message is received. If you can process it, you do so immediately, avoiding delay. Going back to the contrived dialog it would look something like:

Bot:  hello how can i help?
User: hi
(can’t process — wait)
User: i want to check my order status
(bingo)
Bot:  Ok what is your order number?

7. Use checkpoints

As well as validating each user response, you will want to set up various “checkpoints”. This means telling the user what the bot has understood and asking them to confirm this. For example saying something like:

“I understand you want to check the status of order number A123”

Of course, you need to think carefully about how you will handle a negative response. Simply repeating the same questions again and running the answers through the same NLU model or algorithm is unlikely to work. Many chatbots ask the user to rephrase their request in the hope that it will work second time around. We think this is a poor strategy — there’s no guarantee it will work, and it’s a poor user experience.

We believe there are two approaches that will yield better results:

Drill down

We call the first strategy the “drill down” approach. Start out by asking users open questions e.g. “how can I help?” or “what are you looking for?”. Run the responses through the NLU models and algorithms and checkpoint the conversation.

If all is ok, great! If not, you move on to ask more specific, closed questions — probably with some guidance. For example “do you have a query about a return?” You will probably use a different set of NLU models or algorithms to parse these closed questions.

You wouldn’t want to start out by asking this sort of question, because closed questions result in a lengthy dialog. It’s much better for a user to say “I want a white dress in size 12” than answering multiple questions about the product, colour and size. The aim here is to gracefully handle the outliers that can’t be served via the happy path.

Bailout

We call the second approach the “bailout”. Put simply if you can’t understand the user’s needs you fall back to human intervention. See below for more details.

8. Augment your chatbot with human agents

What can you do with the outliers? Firstly it’s important the system recognises when it’s failing to meet the user’s expectations. For your users, there’s nothing worse than talking to brick wall. One way of detecting this is to count the number of “sorry I don’t understand” type responses generated for each dialog. As mentioned above, checkpointing is also very important.

You can’t expect your chatbot to be perfect, and it doesn’t have to be. There will be cases where the chatbot doesn’t understand the user due to an imperfect NLU model or algorithm. There will be instances where the bot simply lacks the business logic to fulfil the users request.

Providing a fallback or “bailout” to human agents is a great way of handling these edge cases. You’re not trying to create the perfect chatbot, even if such a thing were possible. You’re aiming to get the best return on your investment. These esoteric edge cases can be handled by a relatively small pool of human agents. What’s more, the conversations between the users and agents should be logged and will feed into your continuous improvement plan.

You don’t necessarily need to offer live chat style support either. It may be enough to ask the user to email your sales or customer service team with their request.

9. Adopt a continuous improvement plan

The reason you’re logging the conversations is to build up training data, allowing you to build accurate models. To borrow a cliché — this is a process not an event. Whilst the data captured during the initial “human” stage gets you started, you need to retrain the models as you collect more data.

You may discover that your users interact quite differently with your bot vs human agents. Decades of Googling have conditioned people into using a terse form of language. Language intended to help the system understand their query. For example a user may tell a human agent “a white or cream cotton shirt” but tell the bot simply “cotton shirt white”.

It’s also important to keep an eye on the KPIs and metrics.

10. Look for opportunities

Chatbots are freeform, users can say whatever they like. This presents challenges but also opportunities. Chatbots are great for market research.

Take for example, an e-commerce site for a clothing merchant. While viewing a dress the user can choose the colour: red or white. How can the user give feedback that they would like the same dress in black? They could fill out a feedback form or send an email, but they’re unlikely to do this. More likely they will look for another dress or choose another merchant.

In contrast, an e-commerce bot could ask “what colour?” to which the user will reply “black”. The bot would tell the user that the dress is only available in red and white. However, it can suggest a similar dress that’s available in black. Crucially the bot has captured the demand for a black version of the dress. If enough users ask for black, the buyers may decide its worth offering it next season.

Summary

Implementing an enterprise grade chatbot requires careful planning. It’s important to understand the KPIs and business drivers before embarking on the project. Having a means of measuring success is also really important.

Getting suitable training data is essential and one of the best ways of doing this is to use human agents first. Careful logging and monitoring will allow you to improve the accuracy of your chatbot over time. As with all software applications, validation and error handling is very important. Chatbots have the potential to misunderstand users, so checkpointing is a useful double check.

Be prepared to adapt and evolve quickly, especially during the early days. Use A/B testing to find the dialog flows that work best. Retrain the NLU models as you collect more training data. Look for opportunities — are users asking for use cases you’ve missed? Is there demand for a product or variant you’re not yet selling.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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Chatbot best practices was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Automation has consistently been one of the fastest-growing fields in the past decade and also one of the most influential trends. It has been continuously expanding into increasingly complex areas of business operations such as finance and compliance. In the past few years, automation has also become a part of customer relations and management with the help of a technology called conversational AI — the latter proving its importance during the pandemic.

In 2020, with companies being short-staffed globally, automation helped bring productivity and operations closer to 2019 levels but it wasn’t just process automation on its own, conversational AI played a key role as well, both internally and externally. With that in mind, let’s take a closer look at conversational AI’s impact last year and its influence going forward.

What is Conversational AI?

In order to fully understand conversational AI, there are three broad concepts that we must know as well: artificial intelligence, automation, and computer speech. Speech is arguably the easiest concept to grasp — it’s teaching computers how we speak. Computers only speak in zeros and ones, we don’t. Developers and scientists have been trying to bridge this gap by making computer speech more natural with the most progress being made recently with automation and artificial intelligence becoming a part of conversational tech.

Each of these technologies add more capabilities to conversational tech. For instance, AI enables the computer to process exponentially more data faster and significantly refine its speech. Furthermore, with machine learning, computers can “evolve” and learn by making mistakes, although it’s too complex to explain in this article.

Likewise, automation allows the conversational tech to be integrated into complex workflows and be very useful in various areas including customer service, internal messaging systems, business intelligence (BI), analytics, etc.

In essence, it’s a technology that gives computers the ability to not only comprehend natural speech but also derive commands and take appropriate action without any direct input from the user.

Conversational AI Against Global Challenges

One of the most dominant themes of this global health crisis has been limiting human contact. In an ideal world, this would mean that businesses would pivot to operating by putting employees in contact with consumers. However, in the real world, this wasn’t possible due to the heavy reliance on the human workforce.

However, some businesses used this challenge to put conversational AI to its biggest test — replacing human capital, albeit temporarily. From mobile AI assistants that allowed customers to check store inventory without visiting the store to health chatbots that enabled users to self-diagnose and take proactive health measures, a lot of chatbots were deployed last year to continue serving customers without exposing anyone to risk.

At the same time, the extended lockdowns and travel restrictions meant consumers spent over 50% more time on messaging services such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. This also became an opportunity to put conversational AI through its paces. Businesses built applications for messaging platforms and social media platforms to bring important services closer to their fingertips. From placing grocery orders on Facebook Messenger to browsing shopping catalogs on Instagram.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. Chatbot Trends Report 2021

2. 4 DO’s and 3 DON’Ts for Training a Chatbot NLP Model

3. Concierge Bot: Handle Multiple Chatbots from One Chat Screen

4. An expert system: Conversational AI Vs Chatbots

Examples of Modern Implementations of Conversational AI during COVID-19

As you may imagine, the ability to not only parse documents and messages but to also take autonomous action has tremendous value to any business — it’s taking automation to a whole new level. On top of this, because the technology is rather open-ended and the implementation-dependent on the business itself, possibilities are virtually limitless. That said, the use of conversational tech is, for now, most concentrated in a few key business areas including customer service and engagement, business intelligence, and sales.

We’ll take a look closer look at examples of conversational AI in these areas but before, let’s answer the important question of how conversational AI is actually implemented. Since this technology is most useful when users are able to “talk” to it directly, one of the most popular implementations of conversational AI is a chatbot. A chatbot is an umbrella term covering different types of bots but the ones we’re interested in are usually referred to as AI chatbots. Chatbots aren’t new and have existed for well over a decade but with new technologies like natural-language-processing (NLP), developers are able to infuse artificial intelligence to make chatbots far more capable. At the same time, almost all major social media and messaging platforms have chatbot support.

Let’s now take a closer look at some of the most popular examples of conversational AI implementations:

Customer Engagement Bots

Today, you can find more than a handful of companies selling the same product/service at the same price. With so little product differentiation, customers have begun basing their buying decision on customer service. In fact, according to Microsoft, customer service expectations for more than half (54%) of consumers have increased globally.

Customer service/engagement bots are thus built with one purpose — to open up a two-way communication channel that offers consumers a unique and valuable shopping experience. Customer service bots are most commonly known for providing business/product-related information in a question-answer format but there have been some very creative implementations of customer bots as well.

Take, Nike’s Stylebot for example. It’s an AI chatbot that helps customers find, personalize, and even create their own shoe designs. Although customers could buy shoes using the bot as well, its main purpose was to engage with the customers and it did that very well — achieving a click-through rate (CTR) 12.5 times more than Nike’s average CTR and also 4 times the conversions.

Business Intelligence Bots

Business intelligence is a field bringing together analytics, big data, and data visualization to help decision-makers gain visibility inside and outside their company. Most companies deploy dozens of BI tools ranging from relatively simple (GSuite) to custom-built platforms. However, most of these BI tools lack integration which means deriving insights from the data in different tools is still time-consuming and manual.

BI bots use conversational tech and artificial intelligence to trigger complex automated workflows and interpret commands from normal speech and text. For instance, with just a simple text-based message, BI bots can autonomously:

• track and send live updates about lockdowns, COVID-19 cases, supply chain disruptions, etc.
• scan large data sets and find specific documents
• share documents securely
• visualize raw data into tables and charts
• gain crucial insights into customer behavior and buying trends

Sales Bots

AI chatbots for sales is one of the most valuable implementations of conversational AI as it has a direct impact on a company’s bottom line. The purpose of sales bots is to make online shopping more convenient and engaging for the customer. Since an increasing number of customers spent more time on messaging and social media platforms, companies deployed chatbots to bring products where their customers now were.

One of the most popular examples of a feature-rich sales chatbot is SnapTravel. In addition to deploying AI chatbots to all major messaging platforms including Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and SMS, the travel company has also developed RCS chatbots, allowing consumers to check hotel reservations and flight status, book tickets, and much more — through the default SMS apps.

Conversational AI Beyond the Pandemic

Implementing any new technology is a long-term investment which begs the question: will conversational AI still be a viable alternative once things go back to “normal”. Consumer behavior trends in 2021 indicate that conversational tech will not only survive after the pandemic but also thrive. Take a look at the following global trends:

• New Generational Behaviorisms

Millennials but especially Generation Z are growing up with smartphones — they’re absolutely used to the convenience of having the world at their fingertips and it’s going to be essential to cater to these habits.

Furthermore, these demographics actually prefer talking to AI chatbots rather than human sales representatives.

• Productivity and Efficiency

There are hundreds of ways automation improves productivity and efficiency but conversational AI takes this one step further — enabling automation in places where it normally wouldn’t be possible. For instance, L’Oréal used an AI chatbot to free up 200 hours (a whole working month) while shortlisting 80 interns from a talent pool of 12,000.

• Cost Savings

Apart from the indirect cost savings associated with time savings, conversational AI can reduce costs directly by automating a number of tasks in business intelligence (BI), marketing, CRM, and more, thereby reducing dependence on permanent staff. Additionally, conversational AI is more secure, less error-prone, and generally more reliable at handling routine tasks.

• Rise of Online Shopping

Online shopping has been on a steady rise for the past decade and will continue to grow at a fast pace. Furthermore, the pandemic forced a lot of new demographics to shop online for the first time, most of whom will continue shopping online even after the pandemic is over.

• Consumer Engagement

According to KPMG, personalization is the biggest factor in customer loyalty, and we predict that personalization will be one of the most important business trends of this decade as companies adopt more and more technologies that allow them to communicate on a one-to-one basis economically. Conversational AI is one such technology. Furthermore, maintaining a two-way is paramount to increasing brand loyalty and in turn, sales. This isn’t possible with traditional business messaging.

How can a brand benefit from Conversational AI?

The changing consumer preferences and needs are enough to prove that conversational AI is here to stay but it doesn’t just end there. Conversational AI also ties in extremely well with various dominant trends of this decade, making it a key tool in the modern marketing arsenal. It’s a scalable, reliable, and evolving technology that opens up new possibilities to aid in internal decision-making, increase brand loyalty, reduce costs, and most importantly, offer a personalized shopping experience that helps you stand out from the crowd.

Conversational AI has numerous benefits for businesses in 2021 but the most important benefit is conversational AI’s role in differentiating your product or service from the rest. It helps businesses cater to the need for instant gratification by providing solving a wide variety of customer queries instantly. It also enables the business to improve brand loyalty through a more personalized communication channel without any significant increase in CRM costs.

To get started with Conversational AI, consider contacting the Master of Code. If you’d like to learn more about chatbots and how they can be tailored to your exact business model, schedule a free discovery session today with one of our experts today.

CONTACT US FOR A FREE CONSULTATION

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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The Impact of Conversational AI: 2021 and Forward was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We live in a world where robots are increasingly common. There are chatbots on the company websites and machines that build cars and other equipment by themselves. More and more are the tasks that these agents can perform, and OCR is one of them.

This article tells you what OCR is, its applications, and how your company’s chatbots can use it.

What is OCR?

OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition.

It’s a technology widely used in Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, and pattern recognition.

As the name implies, this technology allows a machine to read the text in images and convert this information into code that the system understands.

The text can be printed, handwritten, or typed, and the conversion can be done from scanning or photography.

It can also, for example, read captions superimposed on an image, as is the case with movie subtitles.

The Origins of OCR

According to Schantz (1982), the first forms of OCR were related to telegraphs and reading devices for blind people.

To make such recognition possible, the first versions of this technology had to be trained with images of every character and every existing font.

In 1914, Emanuel Goldberg developed a machine that read characters and converted them into standard telegraphy code.

A few years later, entering the 1930s, Goldberg invented and patented the “Statistical Machine.” This used OCR code to search microfilm files. A while later, IBM bought that same patent.

The Applications of OCR by Sector

Today, OCR systems are already quite effective and capable of easily recognizing any text. That said, their use covers various sectors and purposes.

Banking sector

Reading and Extracting Information of checks — recognizes account number, written amount, and signature. Moreover, it’s used on procedures containing large volumes of documentation.

Insurance Sector

Like in banking, OCR can do information extraction on documents such as accident reports, collecting the cars involved in the claim, the signatures of the responsible parties, etc.

Retail Sector

You no longer have to carry around all the promotional stubs every time you go to the supermarket. Today, most supermarkets already have virtual receipts that can be scanned using OCR to extract the serial number.

Other Applications

Traveling

These days, you hardly need to learn other languages anymore, because technologies take care of that for you. This is the case with automatic translations.

There are more and more applications where you point the camera of your smartphone at a label, for example, and you have all the information translated into your language.

These tools are also useful when traveling, and you want to read the indications on signs, such as geographical names.

Besides, you already see many automated systems at airports, where machines do the ticket verification without the need for human intervention.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. Chatbot Trends Report 2021

2. 4 DO’s and 3 DON’Ts for Training a Chatbot NLP Model

3. Concierge Bot: Handle Multiple Chatbots from One Chat Screen

4. An expert system: Conversational AI Vs Chatbots

OCR Technology in Chatbots

What are chatbots?

Chatbots (conversational robots) are virtual agents with Artificial Intelligence that automate communication processes. Companies widely use these types of bots in their services, such as Customer Support.

These agents need certain technologies, such as Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing, to understand and respond to us.

It may be interesting to consult the articles below to learn more about these technologies:

Furthermore, if you want your chatbot to perform other tasks, such as reading documents, you need to include OCR technology.

The Visor.ai OCR Use Cases

Visor.ai integrates, according to the customers’ needs and requirements, the OCR technology in its solutions.

Heineken Use Case

OCR can be an exciting capability for a chatbot to have, namely in marketing campaigns. Take the example of Heineken.

Heineken launched a campaign where consumers had to send a photo, via chatbot, as proof of purchase of their beers. After the receipt validation, the chatbot would award prizes to users.

You can read more about this case study here.

Email bots Use Case

Another automation solution that Visor.ai offers is email bots.

Email bots are solutions that automate processes that take place, in this case, in the emails that companies receive.

It’s an ideal solution for companies with high volumes of email contacts.

Besides reading the emails, categorizing, and forwarding them to the specialized service departments, these bots also read and check the documentation attached to the email.

That is, imagine you have an insurance company and a customer wants to report a car accident.

To do this, he/she needs to send, for example, the claim registration document and the identification document. However, the customer has only sent the claim document.

In this case, the bot reads the attachment, checks to see if the user properly filled out the documents. And, if the ID document is still missing, asks the user for it.

Only when it has all documents present and well filled out, the email bot pass the case to a human assistant.

Conclusions

OCR technology allows your chatbot or email bot to read and extract information from images/documents that have text.

With this capability, their complexity increases, and they become more efficient as they automate processes that take a lot of time away from their teams.

Whichever Visor.ai solution you’re interested in, talk to us, and we’ll be glad to look at the options that fit you best!

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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OCR: Give Eyes to Your Chatbot was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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Travel App Development Can Save Your Drowning Business During COVID

Travel apps can help small businesses regain a hold on a dying market. Glean insights about travel app development & why to invest in it.

The mobile comes with handy options when it comes to planning your travel. Currently, 80% of travelers use mobile for planning their travel trips and find the best option for trips. Indeed, the coronavirus has a negative impact on this market. However, the businesses are coming back to their previous state with the initiation of vaccinating.

If you are striving to boost your travel business growth and drive in more revenue, it is the perfect time to leverage the earnestness of people to travel and their mode of search on mobile. So, investing your time & money into mobile app development can help you gather huge revenue and brand reputation.

Why a travel mobile app? Well! There are so many reasons for using a travel mobile app as a model of communication between you and your target customers. Let’s take a glint of aspects that make travel mobile app development a profitable deal in 2021.

Why Invest In Travel Mobile Apps?

• $8% mobile users feel glad to research, book, and plan their trip using a mobile device.
• 33% of French travelers plan and book their trip using mobile, while 15% in Germany, 25% in the UK, and 21% in the USA.
• 26% of searches related to travel occur through mobile devices.
• The conversion rate of travel booking is 0.7% from mobile devices.
• App conversion rates are 5X times greater than a mobile website for travel booking.

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So, what do you think now? Isn’t travel mobile app development can boost your business revenue in 2021? Well! The answer to this question is positive. Now, when you know how significant is travel app development, then let’s understand the basics of travel app development and business models you can rely on to boost your revenue. Moreover, when you hire dedicated app developers, you can know about more business models you can follow.

Travel App Business Models You Must Know Before Kick-start Your Business

Do you think that how you can make money through a travel mobile app? Well! It completely relies on the type of business model you choose to create the application.

Don’t you know major travel apps, business models? Let’s glean insights into major business models for the online travel app business.

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#1. Merchant Model

The merchant model is a widely popular and profitable model, followed by Expedia. The company has experienced a gross booking increase of $28.3 billion in the second quarter of 2019.

In this model, the company (platform) buys hotel rooms and resells them to travelers. Expedia rents rooms in bulk, and this way enables hotels to offer the cheapest deals to its customers.

Moreover, the platform can bundle airfares, car rental, and many other services. It enables platform owners to earn a profit on each hotel, airfare, and car rental deals.

#2. Commission Fee

Small hotels don’t have the budget for advertising. You can use a traveling app to help them in advertising their business by showcasing their hotel to your app users and make travel hotel listings.

Booking.com is the application that follows this process. On each transaction, you can add up some commission rates and charge on each hotel booking similarly the way booking.com does. This commission model allows you to earn huge revenue in less time.

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#3. Advertising Model

It is the most cost-effective and reliable model for revenue generation. It works great for small agents who want to build a travel application. In this model, you can show relevant ads of hotels, tour operators, and airlines on your app and can sell advertising space to companies.

TripAdvisor works on this model and earns money from hotels and flights on the basis of cost-per-click. In simple words, you redirect customers to other business websites and get paid for that. But, you need to ensure that you share great information on the platform to gather huge traffic.

So, these were three major travel application business models that you can leverage to gain huge revenue and thrive as a giant travel brand. Moreover, you can also connect with a mobile app development company to figure out more business opportunities and types of applications you can develop by the combination of modern technology. For example, AR/VR enabled travel applications to gain huge attention and acquire an incredible audience base.

Apart from these, you can also create a travel video streaming application that can attract a huge user base, and then you can integrate an advertising model to earn money. In short, there are so many travel application ideas that can allow you to gain huge revenue, but it’s you who have to decide what way you want to choose to attract people.

Features of the application are always a triggering factor that always inspires users to spend more time on the app. Let’s explore some features that a travel mobile app must have.

Features Your Travel App Must Have For Travelers

#1. Registration and Profile Management

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In every application registration and sign-up is the major feature that provides access of the application to the users. Your application must enable users to sign up the app with different sources such as social media network, Gmail account, or user name.

So, each time when users browse the application, it login through a unique identity. You can skip this process, but when it comes to booking, saving payment details, registration is necessary.

Moreover, at this point, you can infuse the app’s security features, such as a secure login with two-step authentication. Besides, you must also ensure that your app has a better and seamless user experience, and hosts should have a personal account to enlist their properties.

For authenticity and safety, registration and profile management are critical steps; moreover, take proper documentation and details of hosts before enabling them property listing.

#2. Search And Filters

The basic function of any travel application is to find a place to travel, hotel room, or airline to travel. Thus, search filters are an essential part of a travel application to enable users whatever they want to search.

But! Remember to create a simple filter, not a complex one, and enable precise information to get results. Following are the primary filters that you can use to show up information.

Location

Dates

Cost

Number of people

Additional services (parking, Wi-Fi, and so on)

Ensure that you create filters for the aspect that users want to search and include all locations of interest in your database.

#3. Feature For Booking

Booking is another essential feature of a travel application that enables you to earn money. Thus, your application must have a feature for booking tickets, hotels, tours, and other relevant services.

To implement this, you can hire full-stack developers or expert programmers with relevant experience in travel app development. One fine example of this feature is Booking.com, Skyscanner, and many are very popular.

But these platforms hardly collect money from the traveler and prefer to leave the job for hosts.

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#4. Notification & Alerts

Notification and alerts are a critical part of travel applications, and many users cherish this facility. It allows them to keep them updated about updates, discounts, reminders before and after the trip. More importantly, when you are developing a travel app, you need to ensure that your application keeps your users updated about every single aspect.

Here are some functionality of push notification that users cherish :

Alerts for new offers. Price changes and discounts.

Reminders for unchecked services

Enhancing customer experience by sending information about booking changes or reminders.

List of MVP features for any travel application start.

Some sophisticated & information-oriented features you can have like:

Currency converter

In-app payments

Language translators

Weather forecasting

These features add up to your application interface and engage users.

#5. Review System

Review system can be found in each application currently trending to travel applications. It enables users to share what they think and discover. It works simply when a user checks out the apartment; the system will pop up a form asking for ratings and reviews.

Recommendation from travelers will enable people to know about the location more and how it seems.

Cost Of Travel App Development

The cost of developing a travel application can be estimated in three aspects, namely, the complexity of the application, module and dedicated platforms required for the app, and the country you choose to hire developers. Actually, including the country defines the budget of development in the ratio, for example.

US-based developers ask for $50 to $250 per hour.

Eastern European-based developers ask for $30 to $150 per hour.

Indian-based developers ask for $10 to $80 per hour.

Let’s see an estimate for the development of applications in both iOS and Android. To developing a proper app with a set of limited features, the cost of development in India can be calculated on the basis of the deactivation of the following activities.

Also, make the below definition estimates for your app (to develop a proper app with limited features and Android coding, the cost in India can be calculated based on the deactivation of the activities below).

Front and rear end development : $10,000 to $20,000

Technical Documents: $1000 to $2000

QA and Testing: $2000 to $4000

UI / UX design: $1500 to $3000

Then, if we calculate the overhead, the average cost of development of a travel application can range between $10,000 to $40,000. Moreover, if you choose to create a cross-platform app or add a few more features and technology like AR/VR and AI, then the cost may range between $60,000 to $80,000.

Wrapping Up

Creating an app for travelers can help you earn huge revenue. Travel apps are increasingly being used by travelers, and businesses are growing with the help of these tools. Moreover, it is bliss to book and find about the tours and location on simple touch on their mobile screen.

In short, investing in travel applications is a revenue-gaining deal. To create such an application, you can connect with a top mobile app development company and secure a splendid application.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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Staggering Insights Into Travel App Development For Small Businesses was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What Are Quick Links?

Quick links are easy-to-click Standard URL’s that allow customers to instantly reach and launch your skill. You can place quick links on your company’s website, in an app, or through social media. Then, customers can access your skill immediately by asking Alexa. The users can launch your skill whenever they are near the device. They can either ask Alexa to send a notification for launching the skill later.

Alexa Skills And User Acquisition

Marketing a sub-par product will not boost sales, just as promoting a low-quality skill will not be as uplifting.

Ipervox did a full analysis of 30 000 latest Alexa skills published on the Amazon Alexa Store. From this analysis, we found out that only 37% of Alexa’s skills had reviews written about them. Of those reviews, less than 20% were positive.

This means that either Alexa skills published have no reviews at all, or they have bad reviews. Despite working on a quality Alexa skill, you need to move the wheels and promote it. It ain’t going to do so itself.

Amazon Alexa store is becoming more and more competitive each day and just putting your skill there is not enough to get user acquisition.

4 Ways To Promote Your Alexa Skill

In order to help you in this competitive voice world, Ipervox has created a Voice App Masterclass. One of the chapters is designed to help the user promoting the Alexa skill. Below are some successful ways we want to share with you in this article:

1. Effective skill and invocation name. We advise you to find an exact name, which is simple to remember and pronounce.

2. Use an icon that catches a user’s eye. Entering the voice world does not mean forgetting about designing. If you want to make a difference, you will need an icon that stands out from the others.

3. Write an attractive and valuable description. If a user stops on your skill when browsing the never-ending list of Amazon Alexa stores, write something cool to read about it. Invest time in a good and concentrated description that speaks only of what the skill does and its characteristics.

4. Share the skill through all possible ways– In September 2020 Amazon Alexa announced for the first time quick links. Through these easy URLs, you can share your Alexa skill via email, email signature, website, and promote it through social media channels.

The Efficiency Of Quick Links

Amazon Alexa allows two types of quick links: one that launches an Alexa skill and one that leads to a custom task within an Alexa skill. These quick links act as the equivalent of when a customer says, “Alexa, open <skill name>” to an Alexa device.

Their advantage is that they are very efficient when sharing your Alexa skills online. Rather than sharing the link to your Alexa skill detailed page on Amazon, you can now allow your users to immediately launch your skill and start their journey towards voice experience on their devices.

Additionally, they allow analyzing better the traffic coming through different channels. To track the number of launches your skill receives from individual links in different online channels, you must use custom tasks and query string parameters, both combined together in your quick link URL.

As an instance, if you are sharing your quick link through social media, including it on ADS or promoting it on your own website, you can gather data of which channel works better when it comes to the number of launched skills.

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Quick Links Structure And How They Work

Before trying to understand how to generate quick links for your Alexa skill, you need to make sure that Amazon Alexa Store approves and publishes your skill. Through the Amazon Alexa account, you can then find your skill ID in the development console.

All you need to do is finding the skill ID on your developer console and replacing it at the URL below.

You can also test how quick links look by the free resources on Alexa labs for Task Buddy skill on GitHub

What Are The Benefits Of Using Quick Links?

• Driving traffic from your ADS
  By including your Alexa skill quick link in your ADS, it will allow you to promote your skill with just a single click and make your audience get in touch with you faster than ever before.
• Driving traffic from your social media
  Having the ability to open a skill directly from a link is an important leap forward in the ability to market. Instead of relying on the audience to remember what skills they see from your business on Twitter and Instagram, you can help them open your skills straight from the post. With just one click away they can launch the Alexa skill or set a notification to launch it later.
• Measuring marketing campaigns
  Through the usage of attribution tags, businesses or personal brands can measure the effectiveness of their Alexa skill marketing campaigns. The ability to launch directly the Alexa skill from the quick link is a smart solution also for skills under the utility category, which are better to be launched without using voice. An example of this can be Invoked Apps that are using quick links to launch their sleep sound skills. According to Invoked Apps founder “Quick Links for Alexa are a game-changing way for customers to launch skills and for skill builders to make better digital marketing decisions”
• Driving traffic from your website directly to your skill
  If you are a personal brand that has your own Alexa skill, you can use your website traffic to promote it. Driving traffic from the website directly to Alexa skill can be a smart marketing strategy also for podcasts, blogs, or radio skills. It helps in reusing your existing audience as a new audience for the Alexa skill.
• Simply engage online
  Despite all the benefits mentioned above, quick links can be used as a simple, effective way to engage online with the audience.

Can Ipervox Help?

Through the Ipervox Voice Platform, you can create an Alexa skill with no coding knowledge required. Our all in one platform will allow you to create your Alexa developer account, create your new Alexa skill, send it for review, and publish it on Amazon Alexa Store. Will it help you also in promoting your Alexa skill?

Ipervox will automatically generate quick links for your Alexa skill throughout the steps of skill creation. These links can easily be copied and pasted on different social media or integrated anywhere else you see as suitable for your Alexa skill.

Furthermore, you can easily track your Alexa skill progress by analyzing it. We offer you the possibility to understand and optimize the voice communication channel. Analytics is not just a process for measuring voice traffic. You can use it as a tool to improve the effectiveness of your voice strategy.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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The search is over: Use Quick Links to promote your Alexa Skill was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.