Greetings and a warm welcome to the June edition of our newsletter, dedicated entirely to the fascinating and ever-evolving world of Conversational AI. Let’s learn about this innovative technology that’s transforming the way we communicate, not only in our day-to-day lives but also across a diverse range of industries.
In this edition, we are also introducing a new section, “Let’s Decode Conversational AI”, where we demystify Conversational AI for you, providing a comprehensive understanding of how it works, its potential, and its future trajectory. Here are some of the top stories from June 2023:
Investment/Partnership Deals
Kore.ai, an enterprise conversational AI platform company, and Mphasis, a leading IT solutions provider enter into a strategic partnership. This collaboration will empower Mphasis to assist its enterprise clients in transforming customer experience management and employee engagement. By combining Kore.ai’s generative AI solutions with Mphasis’ product engineering capabilities, the partnership will revolutionize how businesses interact with their customers. Kore.ai’s Experience Optimization (XO) platform enables companies to effortlessly design, build, and deploy intelligent conversational experiences across various channels and languages. With over 200 Global 2000 companies already benefiting from Kore.ai’s XO platform, this partnership is set to drive innovation and automation in customer interactions and processes.
Lisbon-based company HiJiffy has secured €3.8 million in funding to expand its AI-powered solutions for hotels. With the goal of strengthening its presence in the UK and France and entering the lucrative DACH region (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland), HiJiffy’s funding round, led by Caixa Capital, brings its total investment to €6.2 million. The company will also benefit from a €1.3 million grant from the European Commission’s Recovery and Resilience Plan. This funding boost will fuel HiJiffy’s team expansion, increasing its workforce from 30 to over 50 employees, and pave the way for the launch of an innovative product that aims to revolutionize guest interactions in hotels.
Birdeye, a leading provider of reputation management and digital customer experience solutions, has expanded its premier partnership with Google Cloud which also incorporates Google’s conversational AI service, Bard, enabling businesses to gain valuable insights from customer interactions such as reviews and surveys and respond with greater speed and efficiency. By integrating Bard into Birdeye’s platform, businesses can automate the process of monitoring and addressing customer feedback, saving time and enhancing overall efficiency. The inclusion of Bard unlocks various benefits, including automated response management, faster response times through Conversational AI bots, and the ability to deliver personalized experiences by capturing real-time sentiment from all customer touchpoints. This partnership marks another significant milestone in the advancement of conversational AI-driven customer experiences.
EliseAI, the leading conversational AI platform for the real estate industry, has successfully raised $35 million in its Series C funding round. Point72 Private Investments led the investment, with participation from Koch Real Estate Investments and existing investors. The funding will fuel EliseAI’s mission to revolutionize the industry through AI-powered automation. With its advanced products automating conversations and workflows between potential and current renters and apartment buildings, EliseAI has become the largest and most sophisticated AI platform serving the multifamily and single-family rental housing sector. Currently serving 1.5 million units across 200 customers, including prominent names like Asset Living, Bozzuto, and Venterra, EliseAI continues to drive innovation and efficiency in the real estate market.
New product features, highlights & use cases
Blue Healthcare Hospital Group has announced the launch of the pioneering BlueDoctor.ai, a free medical advisory tool powered by conversational artificial intelligence. Incorporating Generative AI with a foundation in ChatGPT and DialogFlow, this multilingual tool — offering support in both English and Spanish — is designed to guide users through their health concerns, offering dependable advice drawn from a staggering 200 million medical studies, and aims to steer them away from potentially hazardous misinformation online. BlueDoctor.ai specializes in a range of popular medical fields including General Medicine, Dermatology, Psychiatry, and Paediatrics, boasting an unprecedented depth of response not yet seen in similar applications. The launch of BlueDoctor.ai marks Blue Healthcare’s entry into the roster of healthcare firms harnessing the power of AI to benefit patients and professionals alike.
ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW), a prominent digital workflow company, has unveiled its latest generative AI solution, Now Assist for Virtual Agent, aimed at creating highly intelligent, conversational self-service experiences. This new tool extends ServiceNow’s strategy of integrating generative AI throughout the Now Platform, announced at the company’s signature Knowledge event, to allow customers to effortlessly utilize intelligence at scale while streamlining and enhancing digital workflows. By utilizing generative AI, Now Assist for Virtual Agent ensures more accurate, relevant, and conversational responses to user queries, effectively linking these interactions to digital workflows across the Now Platform, thereby strengthening ServiceNow’s foothold in the rapidly evolving sphere of conversational AI.
Go4Customer, a BPO service provider under the Cyfuture umbrella, has announced the integration of Conversational AI into its service offerings, a move that promises to boost operational efficiency and expedite response times. This innovative technology is anticipated to automate roughly 75% of calls previously managed by human agents, who can now focus on handling more intricate, human-dependent concerns. Designed to interpret customer queries accurately and swiftly, Go4Customer’s Conversational AI boasts impressive intellect and dialect recognition abilities, enabling the voice bot to efficiently reroute calls to the appropriate department or agent. Among its notable benefits are its capacity to handle multiple customer queries concurrently without downtime, and its ability to generate personalized, context-specific responses while learning from past interactions. This major development heralds a significant stride in customer service enhancement, reinforcing Go4Customer’s position as a vanguard in the conversational AI landscape.
Clinova, has introduced Healthwords, a pioneering conversational AI tool aimed at offering healthcare advice and self-care product recommendations in the UK. Set to revolutionize the self-care industry, Healthwords employs a mechanism akin to ChatGPT, but refines the search to a single sector, healthcare. Offering free, user-friendly, and anonymous service, this tool is designed for individuals seeking medical advice for less severe conditions who may not have the time to consult a medical professional in person. Users input their queries or symptoms into the conversational search function, and the generative AI technology provides medically verified answers or advice and can recommend self-care products, as required. Available 24/7, Healthwords fills a significant gap for those needing non-emergency health advice outside regular pharmacy hours. While it does not substitute professional medical consultation, it aids in educating users in self-care and alleviating the stigma or reluctance associated with seeking advice for certain personal symptoms in-person.
The U.S. Navy is preparing to introduce “Amelia,” a conversational artificial intelligence program adept at troubleshooting and resolving frequently asked tech-support queries from sailors, Marines, and civilian personnel. Slated for full deployment in August, this innovation is a significant milestone in the $136 million Navy Enterprise Service Desk project aimed at modernizing and consolidating over 90 IT help desks into a singular, centralized hub. Personnel with a common access card, verified through the Global Federated User Directory, can access Amelia via phone or text. Amelia, equipped to answer questions, perform repetitive tasks, and even sense frustration in user queries, has demonstrated its value in tests by significantly reducing the rate of abandoned calls and achieving high first-contact resolution rates. This venture showcases the Pentagon’s substantial investment in AI technology, which is being harnessed for varied applications from target identification in combat vehicles to managing vast amounts of personnel and organizational data.
Global conversational commerce leader, CM.com, is pioneering a generative AI platform that is set to redefine the scope of customer interactions. The platform, which is being launched initially with a group of 10 customers, offers AI-powered assistants capable of generating agent suggestions and recommending next-best actions for brands already using CM.com’s Mobile Service Cloud. The innovative system is projected to significantly impact the Indian IT workforce by aiding sales and support processes and unlocking additional revenue potential. The platform will also equip brands with an internal knowledge base, mitigating the need to source information from internal and external sources during customer engagements. Moreover, it allows live agents to refine their business’s conversational AI through their customer interactions, effectively learning on the job. C
PanGenomic Health Inc. announced that it is planning to launch conversational AI for the NARA app and web platform (“Conversational AI”). The Company released a new version of its NARA app this quarter with an updated plant library, plant rating system, expanded video content and new personalization tools for women’s health. The product changes were designed to allow users to access expanded information about natural solutions and scientifically backed tools in their pursuit of mental and physical well-being. With the future integration of Conversational AI, users will be able to interact with the NARA app and web platform in a more intuitive and effortless manner through natural language dialogue. Conversational AI will be a vital component in allowing a user to take their wellness journey to new heights and further personalize their health experience. Conversational AI will engage with the user to explore relevant information from various sources, such as DNA profiles, existing health regimens, self-reported feedback, and long-term wellness goals.
In a significant move, AlterVerse has introduced conversational AI companions during its ongoing Sky City Beta sessions. These conversational Non-Player Characters (NPCs) represent an innovative intersection of AI, Web3, and immersive technologies. They pave the way for a novel digital experience and alter the methods brands utilize to interact with and build loyalty among their online customers. This introduction not only signifies a notable advancement in the AI landscape but also pushes the boundaries of brand-customer engagement in the digital communication realm.
Let’s decode conversational AI
Generative AI and Conversational AI are different but interconnected aspects of artificial intelligence.
Imagine having a chat with a smart assistant or a chatbot that feels like you’re talking to a real person. That’s Conversational AI in action! It’s all about creating interactive and engaging conversations between humans and machines. Whether it’s a messaging app, a voice-based assistant, or a friendly chatbot, Conversational AI makes it possible to automate communication and provide personalized experiences at scale.
Now, let’s meet Generative AI, the creative genius of the AI world. Generative AI is like an artist that can imagine and produce something new. It has the power to generate fresh content, such as text, images, music, and more. Picture a machine that can write stories, compose melodies, or even create stunning visual artwork. That’s Generative AI at work, using patterns and structures it has learned from its training data to generate remarkable outputs.
But here’s the exciting part: Generative AI can be an important component of a Conversational AI system. The two technologies are interconnected because they can be used together to create more powerful and versatile AI applications. For example, a Generative AI model might create realistic product images that a Conversational AI system can use to answer customer questions about those products. It’s like a tag team of AI awesomeness!
However, it’s important to note that not all Conversational AI systems rely on Generative AI. Some may use different approaches, like rule-based or retrieval-based methods, to generate responses.
The world of Conversational AI is quite vibrant, so, next time you have a chat with a virtual assistant or engage with a chatbot, remember that behind the scenes, Conversational AI and Generative AI are working their magic to make it all happen.