Rise of the Chatbots in April
The wild weather of spring has been nothing compared to the chatbot scene. As more businesses launch bots, and the bot vendors add more features, the industry’s pace is picking up as we come out of winter.
Much of the focus for business remains on tapping into the lucrative millennial market through their cool factor. This ignores the fact that part of the power of chatbots is their universality. It is a common failure by many businesses to appreciate that older users are also perfectly at home with current technology. Thanks to Alexa and friends, smart home gadgets and older-age-group adoption of smartphones, they get chatbots too!
While the gimmicky delights of VR and AR might be firmly aimed at the younger market, chatbots offer a non-judgmental, plain language approach to customer or client communications. While brands might want to focus on a key market, they must ensure that they have bots suitable for all users, perhaps a selection of responses based on different age-ranges?
Healthy News for Chatbots
Chatbots continue to lead the tech agenda in April, with growing use across a range of verticals. A recent Philips SXSW infographic covering the health market shows Telehealth is of interest to 70% of businesses, with chatbots, text or video conferencing all helping reduce the load and time required for face-to-face consultations.
Juniper Research is among the many analyst firms who reckon that major savings will help drive enterprise adoption across health and other verticals, see “AI-Powered Chatbots To Drive Dramatic Cost Savings In Healthcare, Saving $3.6 Billion By 2022.”
Increasingly alongside mentions of chatbots for health is the use of AI, especially for mental health. Nuances of conversation can help AI systems understand what people are having issues with, and a chatbot is available 24/7 to help people through panic attacks or deeper issues, any time of day or night. Using mental health research, they can form responses on the fly for a totally individual chat with any patient, saving the dread of seeing stock response.
It seems every week there’s also a new chatbot for a specific disease or ailment, with Chron’s Disease the latest to get automated support. In future expect all healthcare practitioners, charities and surgeries to offer such help.
For more information relating to various verticals, see:
Education will be one of the sectors that will be revolutionized by Chatbots
IT Leads The Way For Chatbot Deployment And Advanced Use Cases
The Hospitality Industry Welcomes Chatbots With Open Arms
Ecommerce Thrives on Chatbots With Lessons For All Verticals
Customer Services Is Where To Find The Chatbot Action
FinTech And Chatbots Are Natural Business Partners
The Education Sector Can Teach Markets A Thing Or Two About Chatbots
Voice and Chat Commands Will Be Everywhere
We are still waiting for the chatbot vendor ecosystem to engage in the early shots of an acquisition war in the push for growth. But, there is still plenty of movement in the wider AI/voice market. Recently, U.S. credit adviser Credit Karma acquired Penny to help bring bots to its customer interactions.
Most interesting this month, Adobe has picked up Sayspring to add voice commands to its range of creative design solutions. While, for now, future product iterations will be more like Alexa, there’s the option to see design by command by voice or text. So, AI chatbots could take commands and create visual designs or elements based on conversations. This reduces the need for designer input on early drafts, speeding up creative processes.
Then there’s the novel use cases for chatbots that continue to grow. Check out this bot that helps respond to scam and spam emails! Also worth noting is how the “chat” is not necessarily a part of all chatbots. Check out this Tomorrow’s World bot that analyses user’s Instagram photos to judge if they are worthy of posting. We’ve seen plenty of emoji-based and image aware chatbots, so how long will the written word be the dominant form of bot message?
Many businesses assume there is a sizeable cost in launching a chatbot for their customers. But with a range of providers and cloud services, the best news is that they can be produced and operated for free, as demonstrated by SnatchBot. With competition increasing from the major AI-focused players. Businesses need to remember that bots have to work in the customers’ best interest, not whatever a tech brand is trying to sell.
