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Communication and interaction between businesses and their customers underwent a sea change with the advent of Chatbots. Conventional methods of calls, emails, messages are not obsolete yet. But chatbots have substituted them to a great extent.

IT and ITES require recurrent customer support with real-time conversation. Using AI-enabled automation, that job is now easy. In the digital IT environment, all stakeholders look for real-time, engaging communication to solve problems. It is a great experience to get instant remedies and answers from bots rather than logging a service request and waiting for hours.

Chatbot Overview

An intelligent application, a chatbot built on AI, interacts with users, just as humans do. AI, Machine Learning (ML), and Natural Language Processing (NLP) are combined to build a chatbot application. In the IT industry, chatbots are introduced to make everyday jobs simpler, easier, and more efficient.

Automating Workflows

Raising change requests and modifying approvals are common tasks in an IT desk job. What normally happens is that people raise tickets when they want to query information about their assets. These tickets enter a cyclic process of approval and rejections until they resolve. Eventually, the process takes a long time and gets further delayed due to humans’ mistakes.On the other hand, Chatbots are programmed to complete these commands and tasks in a sequential order keeping people out of the workflow. What would take several minutes or hours by conventional means to get done in a jiffy with the help of chatbots? Simply, chat with your enterprise chatbot application, learn about your asset access, apply or revoke asset access, incorporate details, sync them with your assets, and find a lot more information.

HRs and admins can use chatbots to notify employees about their assets’ status. Chatbots have organized how asset management took place, giving HRs and administrators more space to catch up with other work. The development of Chatbot using NLP and ML has improved to such an extent that onboarding and offboarding employees can be done through automated chatbots by allocating just by talking with them. Once chatbots receive the requisite instructions, they produce the expected resources.

Powers Of A Chatbot

Developers are making these chatbots intelligent through successive updates. Improved algorithms, ML, AI, automation, and the implementation of IoT in Chatbots empower them to understand the nature of the request, requester project title, functional area or department, job role, employee number, etc. The need to use a separate application or browse through extensive spreadsheets to find information is diminished as AI-powered chatbots can display the requested information in seconds. A convenient tool for asset management in any IT or ITES organization, these bots can approve the corresponding management to grant access and even automate de-provisioning of access for users.

IT industry stakeholders benefit largely from Chatbots as it helps industry employees, end-users, and agents answer their requests. Volumes of paperwork got replaced with digital tickets in enterprise portals. Now, these are all handled by a smart chatbot.

Chatbots can also perform certain jobs. An exciting instance supporting this finding is that employees can prepare a helpdesk ticket volume report through chatbots. Once the chatbot is programmed with instructions to perform this task, all that needs to be done is to tell the chatbot when to trigger the process. The Chatbot prepares the report and delivers it to the agent instantly, needing no other employees’ intervention.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. Case Study: Building Appointment Booking Chatbot

2. IBM Watson Assistant provides better intent classification than other commercial products according to published study

3. Testing Conversational AI

4. How intelligent and automated conversational systems are driving B2C revenue and growth.

Bots are becoming more advanced with time. They are proactive in notifying agents about any significant event. They also act as messengers who can broadcast messages about asset allocation quite efficiently within an organization.

Usefulness of Chatbots

If asset management is difficult and eats out your precious time, here is how chatbots can help you. This complicated and labor-intensive job took a step up when AI chatbots started doing what humans could do.

Automating asset management or any other IT process that now uses chatbots has received the following benefits.

• Quick gateway to lots of information — Before employees get allocated to projects, they need to educate themselves about the project’s prerequisites. In large-scale organizations, employees find it challenging to procure assets and update the system. AI chatbots rescue this struggle by giving the employee directions to get the right info. Navigate documentation, locate your processes, make changes, query information, and do much more without waiting with chatbots. Internal documentation or knowledge base, a chatbot can help them find answers quickly.
• Chatbots aiding project support — One can discover how to send notifications regarding asset management using chatbots. This automates the otherwise tedious task of sending out alerts to users. For instance, a chatbot can send notifications for multiple tasks, set reminders to follow up with asset allocation, etc.
• The HR companion — For most organizations, a bulk of work rests on the HR’s shoulders. These include informing people of the company regulations, protocols, asset management, etc. Chatbots offer their friendly services to HR. They help employees register themselves with an asset, track asset allocation, asset movement, and asset validity just by asking a few questions in an application.

Conclusion

Thus we can say that the generation of technically inclined people is blessed with the advent of chatbots. One thing can be said for certain that it is not just for customers; it also helps employees conduct their job smoothly.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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How To Automate Asset Management With A Chatbot? was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The effectiveness of Alexa–Amazon’s digital assistant–depends on the skills Alexa has to offer. These Skills are mostly the third-party capabilities built by developers. The Alexa Skills count keeps rising every day, which nowadays has gone over 200 000 available ones worldwide.

The smart speaker market in the US is dominated by Amazon Alexa, accounting for more than 70% of all sales. This leads to promising long-term prospects for the device.

Recognizing these facts, have you ever considered making money with Alexa Skills?
This question goes not only for an Alexa Skill developer but also to businesses and Sellers.

Of course, we can all agree that every new emerging technology has given ways to many companies to make a profit from them. In this case, Alexa Skills make no exception.

Some of the ways you can use in making money with Alexa Skills are:

• In-Skill Purchasing
• Alexa Developer Rewards
• Amazon Pay for Alexa Skills
• Alexa Prize

Surely, monetizing Alexa Skills won’t make you a millionaire within days or weeks but they can bring in a good income.

How to monetize Alexa Skills with In-Skill Purchasing?

If you ask how to monetize Alexa Skills with In-Skill Purchasing, there are two main ways.

The first is to offer Premium single-payment features or content, or by offering a monthly subscription for what your Skill and adding something extra for it to be worth the payment.

For example, if you build a game type of Skill, you can give the user the possibility to unlock extra levels in exchange for a single payment. Or, if you have made a Flash briefing Skill, you can give the user a subscription to premium or more personalized content for a monthly fee.

This can be one of the easiest ways of making money with Alexa Skills. However, your Skill should be already offering quality content with free use, for it to generate new users.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. Case Study: Building Appointment Booking Chatbot

2. IBM Watson Assistant provides better intent classification than other commercial products according to published study

3. Testing Conversational AI

4. How intelligent and automated conversational systems are driving B2C revenue and growth.

Earning money with Alexa Developer Rewards Program

To make customers happy, Amazon will award money to each Alexa Skill Developer that delivers exceptional customer engagement. Amazon Alexa Team considers the number of minutes used each month, total new customers, returning customers, ratings, sessions, and many other relevant factors.

Alexa Developer Rewards is currently available for skills offered in the U.S., U.K, and Germany, with more countries expected to be added soon.

A satisfying and useful experience will drive user behavior and bring customers back. Build something useful that users keep. Use these things to spread the word of your brand and make yourself part of the Alexa Developer Rewards program for the future months to come.

Monetize Alexa Skills with Amazon Pay

Amazon Pay enables Amazon account holders to use the payment methods already associated with their accounts. They can pay for goods or services comfortably, without having to enter their username, password, shipping address, or credit card details.

Amazon Pay for Alexa Skills is also a reliable money-maker. Amazon Pay became available for Alexa skills in 2018. Before that, the company did not allow third-party developers to sell physical products within Alexa skills.

Amazon Pay for Alexa Skills is also a reliable money-maker. Amazon Pay became available for Alexa skills in 2018. Before that, the company did not allow third-party developers to sell physical products within Alexa skills.

Sellers and Brands will be able to sell not only food, electronics, and clothing, but also event tickets, reservations, and much more.

Other means of making money with Alexa Skills

Amazon is expanding its voice assistant Alexa into millions of households and workplaces. Smart home devices such as Amazon Echo (or Amazon Echo Show or Amazon Echo Spot ) can be used to interact with compatible hardware and to access games, flash briefings, recipes, and other services.

This increasing interest in Alexa Skills has created many other opportunities to monetize them or the knowledge about their building process.

Amazon Alexa Prize

In November 2020, Amazon announced that the teams competing for the Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge 4 were selected. This prize is a multimillion-dollar university challenge that was initiated to advance human-computer interaction.

Specifically, these teams will create socialbots that can converse coherently and engagingly with humans on a range of different topics such as entertainment, sports, politics, technology, and fashion.

Each university team that participates will be awarded a $250,000 research grant. They will also receive Alexa-enabled devices and support from the Alexa team.

The grand challenge. One million dollars in research funding will be paid to the winning team’s university if their Socialbot has a composite score of at least 4.0. The Socialbot must be engaged with two-thirds of its human counterparts for at least twenty minutes.

Building Skills for others or training them

1. Another way to make money by building Alexa skills is to build them for businesses or individuals. As more people purchase Alexa-enabled devices, we will need a wide variety of skills. Businesses, in particular, will want to invest in voice technology. Businesses will be looking for developers like you to create these skills and make their lives easier.
2. Now that more and more developers are creating Alexa skills, training courses are an excellent resource for people who are looking to learn the complexities of this new voice-enabled world. You can sell these courses on your site as well. Just remember to create original, quality content that will be useful to users.

However, there are people who might want to build Alexa Skills and monetize them but don’t have coding experience. Or maybe have found the Alexa Skills Kit complicated.
In this case, you can use the Ipervox Platform, be it for a business, radio, or a podcast show. You can even create one if you are a blogger who wants to make his content part of the voice world.
All you need is to press “Get Started”, and you can start building your Alexa Skill with no difficulty whatsoever.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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Best Ways of Making Money with Alexa Skills 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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What We’ve Learned from Designing AI Chatbots for Education

Running a startup is known to be a long and arduous journey, but the Noodle Factory team has kept at it because we know that chatbots can help to change the world. As we’ve grown in knowledge, skills, and clientele, we’ve learned a lot to help us create better AI chatbots for our customers.

From trends to festive seasons to the usual FAQs, there are countless things to consider before building an AI chatbot for education. Through trial and error, conversations with industry experts, and experience with educational bodies, we’ve come to realise that there are a few key questions that need answering before you can embark on the chatbot designing process.

Keep reading to find out what they are!

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Case study: tracking app

Usage of the Design Thinking Methodology and data visualization in the сreation of a new native mobile application for brain activity training from top to bottom.

Brief

Based on user research, to identify an opportunity for an app to improve people’s day-to-day lives with only requirement that it tracks something.
Which features/functionalities to include is open for proposals from the designer.
As this is a MVP (Minimum Viable Product), the app should not try to solve all of the user’s problems at the same time.
For the purpose of this project focusing on the main user flow that will be the defining factor of the user experience, and not worry about: Login, Sign-up, Account/User Management.

Tools: Figma, Google forms, Maze, paper, marker
Duration: 10 days
Team: 2 persons

Challenge

Since the scope of the project was to design an app that improves people’s daily lives together with my colleague we decided to go deeper and create an app that trains brain activities, tracks data and is inclusive also for seniors.

Research

We started with desk research and gathered general data about senior users and their digital preferences.

NN Group uses a simple definition for “Senior Citizen”: seniors are users aged 65 years or older.

In many wealthy countries, people aged over 65 are the fastest growing demographic. As a global society we are living longer and remaining active later in life.
According to a study conducted by the Pew Research Institute, in 2019 73% of people over the age of 65 were connected to the internet. The US Census Bureau reports that people over the age of 65 have the highest household wealth of any age group.
In 2050, almost every second German will be over 60 years old.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. Case Study: Building Appointment Booking Chatbot

2. IBM Watson Assistant provides better intent classification than other commercial products according to published study

3. Testing Conversational AI

4. How intelligent and automated conversational systems are driving B2C revenue and growth.

Here we can clearly see how important this specific audience is and they have special requirements for websites because they have different physical requirements and different experience in dealing with the medium of the Internet.

Research from University of Manchester shows senior users most common preferences. We decided to focused on some of them:

• Use animations sparingly; no dynamic, expandable menus; texts shouldn’t move; no deep information architecture with many hierarchy levels
• Offer larger targets for control elements; easily legible, sans serif fonts in font size 12 to 14 and no fancy fonts; structure in clear and large headings
• Clear contrasts, no changes in the background colors and no use pure white as a background
• Use clear and understandable language; don’t offer unimportant information

Problem Statement and User Persona

How might we help senior people to be included and engaged in brain training app?

From our desk research we could better shape a picture of our audience. As it came out that they are active, curious, vivid and way ahead from a classical stereotype picture of seniors. Meet Edda!

Competitive Analysis and Mood Board

We took several applications that offer brain activity training or general tracking applications and could separate 4 main competitors to analyze.

Conclusion — we positioned our brand, that we named after a small brain storming “Brain Buster,” orientated towards senior users inclusiveness and more simplicity. Based on brand attributes we conducted a survey with 3 different mood boards.

Moscow Method and User Flow

As everything was set we could move to the next step and check what we must/should/could/won’t have in the app and how is gonna MVP user flow.

Low Fidelity Sketching and Mid Fidelity Prototyping

After a quick sketch of basic application screens came the stage where we design a mid fidelity prototype and tested it with users. All went well and we understood that for MVP we need to simplify our prototype and we are ready to go for high fidelity design and prototyping.

High Fidelity Prototype

1. Launch screen and game

2. Progress stats

Key Learnings

• Time management is the key with an exact schedule for how many days each phase we have.
• Mid fidelity prototype testing shows that we tend to overthink and sometimes a simpler way is better for understanding the solution.
• Keeping in mind that it should be senior inclusive, checking for it UI part and over checking it again all the time is crucial, because it’s very easy to slip away.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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Case study: Tracking App was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.