K
Kathleen Martin
Guest
The ability for computers and other machines to understand what we say, and reply to us in a useful way, has improved immeasurably over the past decade. This is thanks to advances in conversational AI – the machine learning-powered language processing algorithms we’ve become used to living with, thanks to the likes of Siri and Alexa.
Today, as well as the general-purpose voice AIs that live in our smartphones and digital assistants, businesses are deploying specialized voice AI across many different industries and applications. They are built into banking apps, fitness trackers, and delivery services like Hermes – whose Holly chatbot can be used to track and schedule deliveries and reroute packages if you're not going to be home.
In retail, they are quickly becoming widely used to provide more efficient, personalized customer service and smoother customer engagement. In fact, researchers predict that 70% of chatbot conversations will be related to retail by 2023. Often this is because they can be used to provide product recommendations and guidance in a more sophisticated, friction-free, and personalized way than a simple website search box.
Kmart Australia, for example, has developed an AI-powered digital assistant called Kbot that integrates with the augmented reality (AR) functionality on its website. It lets customers interact with products such as furniture and see what they will look like in their homes. Once they have found a product they're interested in, they can use voice to ask questions about the product, such as where it's in stock and when it can be delivered.
Retail chatbots are also used for post-sales support, and here they can also have the capability to remember previous interactions. So, if a chatbot has previously managed to diagnose and fix a technical issue for a customer who then comes back with a different issue, it will already have an understanding of some of the issues affecting that person and should be able to find the relevant solution with less friction.
Chatbots and conversational AI apps aren’t limited to online retail. An increasing number of offline retailers are integrating functions that allow us to check inventory and check opening hours before a visit. Once we arrive, we can ask questions about where we will find the products on the shelves.
Continue reading: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/rise-conversational-ai-retail-bernard-marr/
Today, as well as the general-purpose voice AIs that live in our smartphones and digital assistants, businesses are deploying specialized voice AI across many different industries and applications. They are built into banking apps, fitness trackers, and delivery services like Hermes – whose Holly chatbot can be used to track and schedule deliveries and reroute packages if you're not going to be home.
In retail, they are quickly becoming widely used to provide more efficient, personalized customer service and smoother customer engagement. In fact, researchers predict that 70% of chatbot conversations will be related to retail by 2023. Often this is because they can be used to provide product recommendations and guidance in a more sophisticated, friction-free, and personalized way than a simple website search box.
Kmart Australia, for example, has developed an AI-powered digital assistant called Kbot that integrates with the augmented reality (AR) functionality on its website. It lets customers interact with products such as furniture and see what they will look like in their homes. Once they have found a product they're interested in, they can use voice to ask questions about the product, such as where it's in stock and when it can be delivered.
Retail chatbots are also used for post-sales support, and here they can also have the capability to remember previous interactions. So, if a chatbot has previously managed to diagnose and fix a technical issue for a customer who then comes back with a different issue, it will already have an understanding of some of the issues affecting that person and should be able to find the relevant solution with less friction.
Chatbots and conversational AI apps aren’t limited to online retail. An increasing number of offline retailers are integrating functions that allow us to check inventory and check opening hours before a visit. Once we arrive, we can ask questions about where we will find the products on the shelves.
Continue reading: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/rise-conversational-ai-retail-bernard-marr/
