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Chatbot Technology: Expert insights on the future of chatbot technology

Abhinav Girdhar
By Abhinav Girdhar | Last Updated on March 23rd, 2024 10:47 am | 7-min read

Chatbot technology is booming and disrupting every industry you can think of. From simple bots to complex AI-powered virtual assistants such as Siri, Alexa, and Cortana, the chatbot industry is offering something to everyone as per latest chatbot trends.Today, any business can create their own chatbot and deploy it on their website, social media platforms, or dedicated mobile apps to avail the numerous advantages of chatbot technology. In this blog, let us talk about the present and future of chatbots. Let us try to understand how it is presently benefiting the industries and what does future holds for chatbot technology. We will find out what experts of chatbot industry want to advocate about this technology.

Table of Contents

What is a Chatbot?

A chatbot is a computer program that simulates human conversation through voice or text. These are the most widely used technologies in customer service, marketing, and sales.
In addition to being revenue generators, chatbots can also serve as research bots, or for lead generation and brand awareness to save businesses money. As more businesses and consumers use chatbots, the more demand will exist for better development of chatbots, thus making it easier for companies to implement them within their business.- Mai-Hanh Nguyen
Chatbots are also known as “conversational agents” or “chatterbots”. They can be found on websites, apps, social media platforms, and even within your favorite messaging app! The best part about chatbots is that they can understand natural language and process information faster than any human being. This makes them great for handling repetitive tasks like answering FAQs or providing product recommendations based on previous purchases.

How chatbots are benefiting various industries?

As per chatbot statistics from International Data Corporation (IDC), there is widespread adoption of conversational chatbots. Government agencies, the healthcare industry, non-profit organizations, and other businesses are adopting chatbot technology quickly. Chatbot technology is benefiting every industry in one way or another. Let us explain a few major benefits of chatbots with the help of some experts’ views.
  1. Cost-Effectiveness: The primary advantage that chatbots offer is their low price tag. It does not require an hourly wage as traditional employees would require. It also means businesses do not usually need to hire additional workers when they implement chatbot technology, which saves them even more money in the long run.

  2. Cost-Effectiveness: The primary advantage that chatbots offer is their low price tag. It does not require an hourly wage as traditional employees would require. It also means businesses do not usually need to hire additional workers when they implement chatbot technology, which saves them even more money in the long run.

  3. 24/7 Customer Support: Since the bots operate 24/7 without breaks or vacations, users get instant service whenever needed without having to wait around for live agents. Chatbots act as the self help tools for people having common queries!

  4. Customization Options: Most automated online customer support options today simply send canned responses whenever anyone sends an inquiry over live chat software. Chatbot technology offers great customization options so that every message is tailored specifically for the recipient instead of just some generic pre-written text blocks.

  5. Cross-Channel Marketing: The ability of a chatbot to track patterns across multiple channels will allow companies to segment audiences or identify opportunities for effective cross-channel marketing campaigns. This helps in expanding their reach beyond social media platforms.

    6. James Melvin, Head of a Technology Innovation and Security at Rattlehub Digital, further explains: “One should not look at a chatbot as a simple messaging service. Chatbots today are designed to not only perform natural language understanding but are also able to perform cognitive service functions such as:
    • Speech to Text
    • Computer Vision
    • Language Recognition and Translation
    • Content Moderation
    • Speaker Recognition
    • Text Analytics
    It is when you look at a chatbot with this context that you discover that the chatbot is nothing more than a conduit to all the services you offer.”
    If you too want to benefit from chatbots, you can create a chatbot on your own and integrate it in your critical business channels.

    Chatbot Technology: Notable Projects and Initiatives

    The increase in revenues of chatbot industry represents the continued interest by big companies to connect with customers using AI assistants as well as smaller organizations leveraging chat-based functions to reach their target audiences directly where they spend much of their time – messaging apps. There are numerous projects either ongoing or in the pipeline that could help in makingthe latest chatbot technology more mainstream globally. Let us have a look at some major ones.
    1. Smart Assistants for Smart Purchases
      2. Many companies are trying to create smart assistants that should help customers find what they need and solve potential problems during the purchasing process. improve They also improve customer experience by providing more options for support and sales directly via Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp chats. The most advanced examples of this type of chatbots are Apple’s Siri, Amazon Echo's Alexa, Google Now, Microsoft's Cortana, etc.
      In the music world, “bot” is often a dirty word, conjuring up the tools used by high-tech ticket scalpers. Yet 50 Cent, Aerosmith, Snoop Dogg and Kiss have all deputized chatbots as their automatic, ever-alert greeters on Facebook Messenger, handling the flood of inquiries that would overwhelm any human. -Ben Sisario
    2. Animated Bots for Customer Services
      3. Chatbot technology can be used in customer services for different niches. The most popular examples of chatbot applications are animated “bots” that help you to find the right train station, flight, or hotel like TripAdvisor’s Ditto bot, Hipmunk’s Messenger bot, etc. This technology can also be used to solve other problems such as giving information about products and answering general customer queries.
    3. Communication Bots for Team Management
      4. Chatbots can help managers and employees coordinate their work by making it easier to communicate with each other when they are away from the office. They help to improve team productivity because all messages are centralized in one place on the messenger chatbot’s platform. Microsoft Teams already launched a few bots (Whobot, Zoom.ai, ScrumGenius, etc) for team management like syncing conversations, tracking employee engagement, and much more.
    4. Payment Chatbots for Easy Payments
      5. Chatbots are being developed for use in business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) sectors. For example, MasterCard released an instant payment chatbot for Messenger that enables customers to pay for their purchases instantly via chat or voice by linking MasterCard accounts to the platform of a participating merchant. In doing so, chatbots can provide the same personalized services that representatives have been providing for decades.
    5. Virtual Assistants for Customer Support
      6. Chatbots can also be used in call centers for customer service. They act as virtual assistants and help customers in several ways. For example, they answer customers’ questions via email and social networks, handle incoming calls and direct them to the relevant people, deal with shipping issues such as lost or damaged goods, or incorrect orders, and much more. Companies such as Conversica have created chatbots as virtual support teams to provide an effective support interface to customers with little human intervention.
      Chatbots are like our personal assistants who understand us and can be microconfigured. They remember our likes and dislikes and never tend to disappoint us by forgetting what we taught them already, and this is the reason why everyone loves chatbot.-Sumit Raj

      What does the future hold for Chatbot Technology?

      Amid the unprecedented pandemic situation, chatbot technology has noticed the ultimate boom and is expected to observe the same in coming years. If we go by chatbot growth statistics, we can conclude that from real estate to the eCommerce industry, everyone is choosing to integrate their platforms with a chatbot for a better customer experience.Gartner forecasts that when the world does eventually return to a degree of normality, industries are expected to adopt conversational AI at a much higher rate than pre-pandemic. As chatbot technology continues to evolve, it will become more and more useful. It will not be long before people no longer see them as something exotic but as a basic part of their everyday lives. The future of chatbot technology is going to bring a lot more productivity for the users as most of the fields like health, engineering, and travel are going to have their own specialized bots. In fact, we can say that it will make communication easier than ever before. You can easily use them on all your devices from tablets to computers and mobile phones. It will be easy to share information with friends, family members, or even co-workers. You can have a look at the infographic below to know the future trends for chatbots.What’s Next for Chatbot Technology?
      Chatbots will become much smarter in the future as they will
      • understand the context of conversations with users and use that information to deliver personalized results even it is in audio format
      Ironically, a lot of people think that they’ve never used a chatbot, they’ve never experienced it, when in fact they have. Because Siri and Google and Alexa and all those voice-activated speaking bots, if you will, those are actually audio chatbots.- Kelly Noble Mirabell
      • talk to several different people about different topics without getting confused or giving out conflicting information.
      • use photos and videos to communicate, as well as make phone calls by interacting with augmented reality technology. One day you may see a chatbot reenact the famous scene from Blade Runner where Rutger Hauer’s character talks about his feelings toward “replicants”!
      This is why experts say that conversational AI chatbots will soon outperform us by understanding both verbal and non-verbal cues when talking with people.
      Before there were computers, we could distinguish persons from non-persons on the basis of an ability to participate in conversations. But now, we have hybrids operating between person and non persons with whom we can talk in ordinary language.-Kenneth Colby
      However, there is still much work to be done for this kind of communication to become widely available, so it could take some time before anything like that becomes a reality. Chatbots are still struggling to be useful and have yet to reach their full potential. You should not ignore the benefits chatbot technology is offering you in present times. Just create a unique chatbot for your business now!

      Final Thoughts

      Chatbots have added an additional layer of convenience and accessibility for consumers in today’s digital world. The popularity of this technology has led many consumer-centric companies to integrate chatbot functionalities into their websites and apps as a means of providing 24/7 customer service support. Although nothing is certain in the world (especially when it comes to predicting technological trends), there is no doubt that chatbots are here to stay – at least for now!
      You all know that chatbots are a new technology altogether. It’s like the early age of the Web. Things are still shaky yet growing at the speed of light.- Rashid Khan, Build Better Chatbots
      Let us know your thoughts on how you think the future scope of chatbots!

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Abhinav Girdhar

Founder and CEO of Appy Pie

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