Chatbots Vs. Voice Search: Understanding the Differences and Benefits
Table of Contents
Chatbot
A chatbot is a computer program that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to understand customer questions and automate responses to them, simulating human conversation. We discuss Chatbots Vs. Voice Search and Understanding the Differences and Benefits of it.
What is a Chatbot?
Chatbots as a new information, communication, and transaction channel enable businesses to reach their target audience through messenger apps like Facebook, WhatsApp, or WeChat.
Compared to traditional chats, chatbots are not handled by human persons, but by software leading through conversations.
The latest chatbot developments in customer services and sales are remarkable. However, in the field of public transport, little research has been published on chatbots so far.
With chatbots, passengers find out timetables, buy tickets and have a personal, digital travel advisor providing real-time and context-relevant information about trips. They include travel, product, service, content preferences, usage patterns, and location-based and population data.
Chatbots have many advantages for both companies and mobile users. They enable new user touch points, improve convenience, reduce service, sales, and support costs, one-to-one marketing, new data collections, and deep learning.
Using chatbots, smartphone users can reach a company anytime and anywhere. The questioned users of an investigated prototype are remarkably open to new mobile services, and they quickly adapt to this technology.
Using chatbots, Consumers and businesses can communicate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, independent of working or opening hours.
What is Voice Search?
A Voice Search (also called Voice-Enabled Search, Voicebot, Voice User Interface (VUI), Vocal Assistant, or Voice Assistant) is a conversational robot able to speak with a caller.
In other words, a Voice Search is a virtual agent capable of understanding, interpreting, and then analyzing requests expressed by an individual and responding to them vocally with everyday words, which is called “natural language”.
The best-known Voice Searches are called Siri, Alexa, or answer when you say “Ok Google”. Available on multiple media, including smartphones, they are developing more and more in our daily lives. Voice Search can be integrated into connected objects (household appliances, cars…), manage phone conversations (callbots), and start a conversation from a website or a mobile application.
Beginning of Voice Search
In 1961, IBM launched its first computer with digital speech recognition, known as Shoebox. At that time, it was very basic since it could recognize only 16 words and numbers from 0 to 9.
It was not until the 1970s that speech recognition technology was developed by Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
In 1993, IBM launched the first smartphone called Simon, which introduced the foundations of intelligent conversational agents. At that time, Simon was the first commercial product capable of converting spoken text into written text.
Voice technologies took off in the 2000s when Google, Apple, and Microsoft took over. In 2008, Google launched the Google Voice Search application that allows users to perform voice searches. Siri will be the first digital assistant available on the famous iPhone 4S in 2011.
Since then, voice assistants have continued to develop and make our daily lives easier in many ways.
Moreover, Voice Search is a practical conversational agent to be combined into our daily life: we can talk to it while driving, cooking, or taking care of our children.
Google Voice Search
Several popular iOS and Android apps and devices. Here are a few products and services that have practically become household names:
- Google Assistant
- Google Smart Assistant Devices
- Amazon Alexa
- Apple Siri
- Microsoft Cortana
Voice Search, Chatbot: what is the difference?
Siri, Ouibot, Alexa… These vocal assistants talk to you every day! They are all virtual agents based on conversational artificial intelligence. But what makes them different in practice?
Although they are based on the same technology, Voice Search and a chatbot do not operate on the same channel. As its name suggests, a Voice Search works only on the voice channel. In contrast, the chatbot is reserved for the text channel, and can only work on a website or an application.
Due to this difference, the Voice Search requires two additional features compared to the chatbot: voice recognition, to transform the sound of your voice into a sequence of words that will be analyzed by the same type of engine as a chatbot; and speech fusion, which allows the robot to speak to transmit the answer orally.
The Chatbot is a specialized Voice Search, to which you can only speak over the phone. Indeed, a Voice Search integrated into a smartphone, or a connected speakerphone will be able to handle many simple operations, from sending a text message to setting the house heating or searching for the weather of the week.
Benefits of Chatbot to Companies
- Faster internal processes
- Cost savings
Benefits of Chatbot to Customers
- hour availability
- Scalability
- Consistent answers
- Recorded answers
- Multilingual
- Endless patience
- Convenient for introverts
- Programmability
- Personalization
Benefits of Voice Search to Companies
- Improve SEO efforts.
- Growing number of Searches each year.
- Voice Optimization gets more hits from local searches.
- Optimize for voice searches by answering common questions.
- Optimizing your business for voice search creates a better customer experience.
Benefits of Voice Search to Customers
- Service Improvement.
- Brand Management.
- Product Innovation.
- Marketing.
- Increased Revenue and Customer Retention.
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