Year: 2021

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Audio ads: they’re all around us today. People listen to them on a range of distribution channels, like radio, podcasts, smart speakers, music streaming services, and more. Audio ads are a key component of the audio revolution because they are central to the promotion of products and services.

Audio ads are a type of marketing that can be especially powerful. These advertisements typically take the form of radio broadcasts or podcasts where a story is told to listeners concisely and compellingly. When done correctly, advertisers can take advantage of one of the most resonant marketing means such as audio. With the power to engage, inform, and entertain people outside of their homes, advertisers can find success.

Advertising for your brand can be complex. It can range from using Alexa Skills, Google Assistant Actions to TV ads. Using a Skill or Action on Alexa or Google Assistant is one of the best ways to make sure your audio ads are making their way into the homes of millions of people who own a smart home device. These devices speak with these people every day, which will make sure that your audio ads are heard.

How to make your Audio Ads conversational through Voice Apps

Creating great conversational ads is a delicate art, and it’s not as easy as you might think. When writing a script for your ad, you must put yourself in the shoes of the listener to make it work.

More and more listeners are turning to audio streaming services that are available through smart speakers. This means that traditional radio and similar broadcasting services will have to compete with this new technology.

Developing clever conversational ads for voice-driven platforms will be essential for success in the voice space. Of course, dedicated voice applications sound like the best solution to reach such an audience.

However, don’t worry about how to create a truly effective conversational ad for this platform.

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Here are 4 tips on how to create the best of them:

1. Focus on making it as conversational as possible

Consider that the primary reason people use smart speakers like Amazon Echo is their ability to provide conversational experiences through the specific voice assistant, in this case, Alexa. Therefore, when creating your audio ads focus on making them conversational. When designing the conversational flow do it by analyzing how your target audience reacts to such experiences. Finding the appropriate voice tone for the audio will be the key to making it conversational and friendly, and ultimately attract the attention of the audience.

2. Find the best way to approach your target audience

In the space of voice applications, you will have two ways to reach your future customer.

• The first and the simplest one is to use an already existing streaming service like Spotify, Pandora, Amazon Music, etc. But, their services offer little to no possibility to control the user experience. This means lower chances of gaining new leads.
• The second one is to develop your own voice application. This way, you will have total control over the user experience, while generating valuable user analytics. Later, the collected data will provide you with the information you will need to improve your ads and better target the audience.

3. Harness the characteristics “voice” has to offer

Different from written ads, if used correctly, Audio Ads have the opportunity to better engage your audience. What makes them unique is the ability to transmit emotion and humor. These qualities of voice can be a powerful tool if placed well within the audio content.

4. Consider offering something extra

One of the best ways to gain the attention of the listeners and push them through the next steps is by offering something special. It can be a special promotion, a discount, a voucher code, something free, etc. This will surely attract more listeners to take further action and generate more leads. Furthermore, this way, you can hook them up for other services or products your business has to offer.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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How to Create effective Audio Ads for Streaming Services & Voice Apps: 4 Tips for Success was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How AI facilitates communication between companies and their customers

Imagine having a crucial online meeting in a couple of minutes, but your internet connection refuses to work. Stressed out, you call the customer support line, and the voice, that picks up the phone introduces itself as a digital assistant…

You start losing faith in solving the problem in time. The robot, however, quickly understands your issue and provides clear instructions on how to solve it. You don’t have to repeat your questions or push any numbers for forwarding the conversation. Everything works fine in a moment.

This example is how the company call centers and technical helpdesks might look in soon future.

More than 80% of people spend more money in a company they had a positive customer experience with. And AI voice bots represent a significant step towards improving that experience. Companies and customers alike often fear that digital voice assistants are an obstacle to their relationship. But at the same time, they often overlook the many benefits of involving a voice bot in a contact center.

Close to the humanlike interaction

Digital voice assistant opens customers new ways of communication with the companies. It never sleeps, so it can solve various routine problems at any time. Additionally, there are no waiting times with voicebots because their call capacity is unlimited. When there is a mass internet connection outage, you will not get stuck on the line. And last but not least, communication with a voicebot is natural and enjoyable.

There is a reason why people often feel unsure about voicebots, and it is called the Interactive voice response (IVR) system. Communication with this predecessor of virtual assistants was slow and frustrating. Compared to it, voicebots excel in every possible way. They do not force you to push numbers, repeat weird structured questions, or wait on the line with an annoying melody playing in the background.

Artificial intelligence will first ask you to describe the problem to understand its nature. Then, if it can, it will propose a solution. The digital assistant also recognizes when it reaches the conversation dead-end. Then, instead of bombarding you with more unnecessary questions, it connects you to a qualified human operator.

The huge advantage of an AI voicebot is its ability to understand natural language. When explaining the issue, you can use your own words because the assistant is trained to understand all the related phrases. “I can’t use the internet. Our router has stopped working. The wifi is not running again.” It doesn’t matter which words you use, the voicebot will understands and proceeds to additional questions.

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Help in the times of Covid

There are even more advantages of digital voice assistants. Security is undoubtedly one of them. When someone calls bank support and requests a forgotten card pin code, human operators do not have the authority to do so. These restrictions do not apply to artificial intelligence since it will not reveal the card code to anyone but your authenticated self. Similarly, it is beneficial to use a voice bot while addressing topics such as health conditions. The digital assistant is discrete and will never make fun of your medical condition in front of his colleagues.

In current times affected by Covid-19, other benefits of digital voice assistants have emerged. Some institutions, such as health insurance companies, face an enormous number of callers asking various questions related to the epidemic. The capacity of their helpdesk is unfortunately often limited. At that moment, the voice bot, which can learn to deal with dozens of often repeated requests quite quickly, has the opportunity to shine. It manages a variety of routine problems and saves its human colleagues lots time to deal with more complicated topics.

With all the advantages mentioned above, the development of technology towards digital voice assistants seems logical. After all, the spoken word is the most natural way people communicate their needs and desires.

Of course, artificial intelligence cannot replace human operators in every aspect of their work. But if, by any chance, you will be connected to a digital voice assistant while calling customer service, do not worry. If it was programmed to solve your problem, it will do it as good, maybe even better, than its human colleagues. If not, it will happily transfer your call to an operator who will.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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Hello, voicebot speaking. Ready to solve problems 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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Growth is desired by all businesses but in order to grow and upscale a business, a lot of resources are needed. Apart from the right business strategy, you need a lot of people to execute tasks,

Highlights:

• What is an Automated Virtual Assistant?
• How can AI-powered Virtual Assistants help Scale your Business Up
• Automating Business Workflow
• Better Customer Relationship Management
• Concerns and Challenges with AI Virtual Assistants
• Proper Design of Use Cases and Initial Training
• Privacy and Security

Well, maybe not anymore now because the technology of artificial intelligence has raised to the point that they have the power to automate a lot of business tasks with a higher degree of accuracy and efficiency. With digital transformation accelerated by pandemics, many people are shifting to including virtual assistants at least in some areas of business.

Here in this article, let us discuss all essential things regarding these AI-powered Enterprise Virtual Assistants — — What they are, how they help, and some challenges they present.

What is an Automated Virtual Assistant?

An artificial intelligence virtual assistant is software that can effectively occupy the position of virtual assistant and carry out much of all expected tasks, like managing interactions, scheduling tasks, and much more.

You may have already experienced personal assistants in your mobile, pc and in other ways too. Think of Siri, Alexa, Cortana, and Google Assistant. All these assistants are already powerful in understanding the intent of their users and satisfying their requests. So, no wonder people would think of using AI-powered virtual assistants for their business needs.

The practice of hiring virtual personal assistants has been there for a long time. Business owners used to hire a person, many of them sometimes to be their virtual assistants and carry out many of their important tasks.

Digital virtual assistants use various technologies of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning including NLP (Natural Language Processing) NLU (Natural Language Understanding) for performing their tasks. A great thing with machine learning models is that the more data they receive, the more accurate they grow.

Not only through text, they also support interaction through voice which is a great advantage.

With a small yet crucial initial training, they can harness their already trained machine learning models to quickly start becoming your virtual personal assistant.

Also, these assistants would be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week throughout the year!

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4. Chatbot Vs. Intelligent Virtual Assistant — What’s the difference & Why Care?

How can AI-powered Virtual Assistants help Scale your Business Up

Artificially intelligent virtual assistants are designed so that they can understand your intent accurately not only through your immediate message but also across various data channels and perform automation over vast environments for executing required tasks.

Automating Business Workflow

Your business workflow might include a lot of repetitive tasks or certain tasks that can be easily done by software. A report by McKinsey in 2017 states that 60% of all occupations contain at least 30% of activities that are automatable! Many years into the future, as automation is steadily being used in industry, we can see that much of all activities that can be automated have been automated now and this trend will only increase in the future.

By saying “automatable” tasks, they do not necessarily mean only customer service or general scheduling. While they are important, many other tasks like Marketing, Human Resources Management & recruitment can also be automated!

The virtual AI assistant you use can integrate itself with a wide range of solutions you already use for performing these tasks.

Better Customer Relationship Management

An intelligent virtual assistant not only helps in turning leads to customers but also provides a lot of help in maintaining customer relationships in resolving their problems and queries.

Instead of dedicated employees working round the clock to attend to all requests, virtual assistants can be deployed to automate and manage many customer problems. When correctly integrated, they also have the power to solve a range of queries including giving insights and tracking product delivery. They can also notify your customers when appropriate.

Concerns and Challenges with AI Virtual Assistants

Just as with many solutions, using a virtual assistant bot in your business has a lot of advantages and also presents challenges too. These are some prominent challenges with using AI-powered virtual assistants:

Proper Design of Use Cases and Initial Training

All of the virtual assistant platforms are pretrailed well and come with a lot of features. However, it is only in your hands to design it perfectly with use cases. While there are platforms that may do that too for you, it is ultimately you who knows what your personal assistant must do.

That is, you just design robust use cases that perfectly justify business uses and make use of all features of Virtual assistant. This might take some time but provides very valuable returns.

Privacy and Security

As technology occupies every aspect of your life, privacy becomes a huge concern. All of your activities might be recorded by the company and fed into their big data pool. While some are okay with it, many are not. It is up to you to decide which level of privacy you want.

Also, popular platforms often become targets for hackers, and as such even though a company vows to protect your privacy, it might be susceptible to malicious attacks.

Even though a company protects your data very tightly, there are still chances an attack could happen in the arguably weakest link — humans. Social engineering attacks are being more sophisticated and the price of not being aware would be high.

Final Words

Businesses, especially smaller ones, have been long using virtual personal assistants to decrease the load on them and outsource much of their work.

These people would be trained in many skills and work mainly on an hourly basis. Artificial intelligence-powered enterprise virtual assistants are being more and more popular because they work perfectly well as personal assistants all while providing the benefits of being digital — — maximum uptime and minimum costs.

As much as they have advantages, they have their challenges and concerns. It is up to you to make perfect use of technology all while being safe.

By taking much of the administrative and repetitive tasks out of you, virtual agent software would ultimately take a lot of burden out of you. With this, you get a lot of time to focus on improving your business which ultimately, Increases sales and makes you profits!

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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Scale Your Business with AI-Powered Enterprise Virtual Assistants was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Samsung’s Bixby may be the flag bearers of voice assistants (VAs) but the technology itself is no longer limited to megacorporations. Instead, it is finding its way to numerous enterprise-level applications. This new wave of adoption is evident in recent statistics too:

• Global Banking and Finance Review reported that 88 percent of global business leaders think that voice assistant technology has the potential of growing their businesses.
• On the consumer side, a survey from Google reported that 72 percent of Google Pixel’s users use the phone’s AI voice assistant daily.
  Additionally,52 percent of those consumers expressed that they would like to receive information about various products and brands via voice assistants.
• Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning have breathed a new life into VAs and are now reshaping consumer behavior trends, which opens up a plethora of opportunities for businesses to capitalize on. Not surprisingly, they have.

In this article, we’re taking a look at some of the popular use cases for voice assistants for businesses as well as the benefits driving these implementations.

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Why Are Businesses Investing in Voice Assistants (VAs)?

Voice assistants typically found on mobile devices like Siri and Google Assistant are examples of Voice User Interfaces (VUIs). Although VUIs have existed as early as the 1950s, greater technological challenges meant that modes of communication like typing took precedence in most business implementations.

However, most of those technological barriers have been overcome and VUIs of today offer many important advantages over their counterparts, like:

1.Speed
As accustomed as some of us have become to typing, speaking (or dictating messages) is still a much faster way of communicating. A study showed that even expert typists were not faster than modern VUIs at taking down messages.

2. Hands-free
Another major benefit of using voice assistants is having both hands free. This further expands the possibility of multitasking, especially for employees who often have to stop what they are doing in order to respond to an urgent text message or send a file to a colleague.

But not only can voice assistants improve productivity in and around the workplace, but they can also improve safety. In many cases including driving or cooking, being able to communicate through voice instead of typing is both more practical and safer.

3. Easy-of-use
Speaking is natural, more so than typing even in 2021. This becomes especially important when the technology is consumer-facing. For instance, a parking lot’s automated toll booth or an iPad taking customer feedback are both far more intuitive when they are designed to both understand the user’s verbal commands and provide assistance. Not to mention, VUIs began their comeback only recently so the technology is still a novelty that many customers would enjoy.

4. Intonation
Text messages often lack factors that convey emotion, often leading to ambiguity and even miscommunication. Voice assistants, on the other hand, are designed with the tone, volume, intonation, and rate of speech in mind to convey a greater range of emotions.

5. Screenless Devices
Finally, with wearable tech with displays like smartwatches and IoTs like smart speakers, voice is the only way of interacting effectively. This is both an incentive to invest in VUIs as IoTs will become more commonplace and also a benefit of already pursuing this technology.

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How Businesses Are Using Voice Assistants or VUIs in 2021

The ability to speak and get things done has virtually unlimited use cases but the following five use cases explore the most popular implementations of voice assistants or (VUIs in general):

Embeddable Voice Assistant Technology for Chatbots

Text-based chatbots have become very commonplace, especially in retail, eCommerce, and banking applications. And since improving customer experience is the top priority, many businesses want to add voice recognition capabilities to their existing applications.

Embeddable Voice Assistant is a technology developed by Master of Code that allows existing mobile apps to communicate with Microsoft Azure Bot via Direct Line (or any other bot framework). This brings voice assistant capabilities to existing apps at a fraction of the cost of developing a voice assistant from the ground up.

Consumer Products and Retail

A recent report on voice and text-based assistants found that consumers of the retail industry demonstrated a 15 percent higher future preference of voice assistant technology to chat assistance. There are a few reasons behind this shift, one of the most prominent reason being that many online shoppers need a more efficient alternative to browsing dozens of product pages in modern eCommerce stores. Voice assistants effortlessly direct them to the relevant products through a single voice command.

Voice Payments

The finance industry has been using voice-enabled devices to save time and enhance customer service, which is key in developing business in this industry. For example, Garanti, a Turkish bank, has developed a Mobile Interactive Assistant (MIA). Customers can use MIA to use their mobile banking app through voice commands. The communication isn’t one-way either. The voice assistant can also notify the customer about recent promotions/offers and analyze their usage patterns to create a personalized experience.

This is a big move as it helped dispel some of the security concerns surrounding voice-based chatbots. And as financial bodies continue to embrace voice-based technologies, the adoption rate in the sector will rise.

Business Insider says that the use of voice payments will grow from 8 percent to 31 percent of US adults by 2022.

Another reason why voice payments are emerging as a prominent means of payment is that consumers are driven towards a cashless payment alternative that’s faster and more seamless than tap-n-pay options available today. That said, VA technology still has some ways to go before it becomes mainstream in the banking sector, mostly because of the security challenges it entails.

Improving productivity within the organization

Apart from enhancing the consumer experience, AI-based voice assistant technology offers great potential to increase a company’s productivity levels. Results from a survey indicated that using digital assistants can compensate for up to 6.2 billion work hours. This is not just effective; it offers companies to achieve superhuman levels of productivity and minimize human labor wastages. The Capgemini Research Institute Survey found that enterprises are increasingly relying on increasingly accurate natural-language understanding (NLU) to trigger various automated workflows with voice commands, especially in areas such as document management, customer relations management, and HR.

AI-powered voice assistants are also capable of processing and analyzing extremely large chunks of data. This can be used to automate repetitive tasks or labor-intensive tasks. An interesting implementation of this can be found in numerous HR departments around the world. HR managers rely on voice assistants to evaluate multiple recruitment databases simultaneously and add a conversational medium between the applicant which can be further used for automated screening. Furthermore, VUIs like Darwin give employers an easy to evaluate team performance, view attendance, payrolls, etc.

Collecting feedback and developing strategies

VA bots can gather consumer data about their interests which a human cannot. A company can use this data to understand trends in consumer interests and develop products and marketing strategies accordingly. Currently, voice shopping is valued at $2 billion and is expected to hit a whopping $40 billion by 2022. Therefore, global brands like Johnnie Walker and L’Oreal are partnering with companies like Amazon to make their product information easily accessible through Alexa and other Voice User Interfaces (VUIs).

VUIs have such a large market that companies have started considering voice technology in product design, delivery, and marketing strategies to better connect with their customers.

Inclusiveness and Accessibility

Every organization has users with motor and linguistic disabilities that make it difficult for them to use certain types of interfaces — handheld or text-based interface being one of them. And even though nearly one billion in the world experience some form of disability, most computer systems aren’t designed for inclusiveness — in essence creating a barrier for nearly 15% of the population.

Federal legislation like the Americans with Disabilities (ADA) is helping improve the situation but compliance can be very expensive (non-compliance even more so). This is where voice assistants offer a cost-effective solution by providing both verbal and visual aid by not requiring users to read the text on the screen or be able to touch it (type responses back into it). In fact, a peer-reviewed study from 2020 found that users with disabilities could effectively use voice assistants and take control over daily tasks (which would be a great boost for mental health as well).

Voice assistants also ensure that individuals with temporary disabilities like hand fractures can still use their favorite mobile apps.

Advertising and Marketing

The eCommerce global market has increased to a noteworthy $4.28 trillion, a 320 percent increase since 2014. As a result, many businesses have switched to digital marketing to support this shift. Mass marketing, especially out-of-home (OOH) advertising is becoming a less appealing form of marketing for enterprise-level businesses every year. And companies are speaking with their wallets on this because the global print advertising market has plummeted by a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of — 9.82 percent, dropping down from $39.3 billion in 2019 to $35.44 billion in 2020.

Instead, as consumers begin to spend more time on their smartphones and computers, the most effective way to advertise is shifting in the favor of voice technology. As consumers embrace VAs as a normal part of their life, the way they interact with marketing campaigns is also changing considerably. Forecasts suggest that global marketing efforts will continue focusing heavily on VAs simply. Some of the reasons behind this shift include:

• voice assistants offer personalized recommendations and offer to users making them more effective
• marketing strategies such as upselling and cross-selling can be employed more naturally through voice
• VAs provide direct consumer insights and feedback to marketers.

Where Conversational User Interface Is Headed

Voice assistants are a part of a broader spectrum of Conversational User Interfaces that also include text-based chatbots. The emerging popularity of these conversational user interfaces is the result of a major global shift to make everything conversational — from controlling your home electronics to creating a digital shopping list.

But like all consumer trends, is conversational user interface like VAs and chatbots going to go out of fashion? Perhaps at some point but certainly not for the next few decades. If anything, the technology will only grow as 64 percent of consumers want their AI virtual assistants to be more human-like.

For now, VA technology is changing the business landscape as evident by these voice assistant use cases. From eliminating human redundancies to making business operations more efficient to improving customer engagement, voice technology is being rapidly incorporated across industries all over the world.

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Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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Voice Assistant Use Cases: Business Implementations of VUIs in 2021 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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