The alarm clock rings and your hand moves towards the smartphone. Via Face ID you unlock the device and first of all you ask Siri how the weather will be today – “The weather in Germany will be sunny and warm today,” the familiar voice replies. Even before getting out of bed in the morning, most people have already experienced artificial intelligence. Also in profession artificial intelligence is becoming more and more important.
The term artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer an unknown one – Face ID, personalized news feeds, chatbots and big data – AI affects our everyday life and furthermore also our communication behavior. In the age of digitization, the way we communicate has changed a lot, in private life and in profession. However, language is still the most important, natural, creative and emotional one. It’s the natural language itself that provides the necessary resources to the machines to communicate with us. AI uses individual words and phrases, processes data and thus lets machines communicate with us. Long story short: Machines learn to speak, they answer our questions, control navigation systems and devices for us and for the majority of people voice assistants are already an integral part of their lifes. We are talking about Siri, Google Home, Alexa & Co. The results of a Statista survey in Germany in 2019 showed that around 29 percent of those are in possession of a smart speaker.
Voice assistants are changing customer communication
The growing range of voice assistants holds great potential for companies. Areas such as e-commerce, marketing, content and service, retail and brands benefit from their artificial colleagues by placing their offers via voice assistants and provide outstanding support. Companies and brands can talk to customers location-independent by using the digital assistants. Media houses also recognized an opportunity in these assistants. For example if you ask for the latest news, Alexa will read the top news from papers such as Spiegel Online, Tagesschau and Bild. Entire dialogs are already automatized – we ask the machines, they answer, or in this case we rather ask the chatbot.
Hello, my name is “Bot“, how can I help you?
Chatbots are software robots that communicate with us on a textual and auditory level. They are databases with a huge repertoire of answers to FAQs and therefore they are primarily used on websites as part of customer service using instant messaging systems. Basically, chatbots can be used wherever communication occurs, such as “quick replies” on emails, bookings and reservations or in sales as a cross-selling strategy. Chatbots are also perfect for generating valuable leads and furthermore they are used on social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn to simplify the communication issues between companies and users. In this way, invoices can be automatically sent to the customer or purchases and bookings can be made.
AI and chatbots have undoubtedly arrived in the field of customer communication and have become an integral part of it. They change and enrich our way of communicating with each other, but note that employees cannot (yet) be replaced by language-machines because empathy, humor and emotion are human.
If you as a company or service provider want to communicate in a timely manner, contact us and learn more about digital communication channels. We’ll be happy to help you to improve your performance while increasing your earnings.
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